8 Simple Tips to Reduce and Optimize Website Loading Time

Waiting is always irritating and everyone hates to wait. This is also true for websites and blogs, if your website takes too much time to load then it starts losing its visitors and customers. As a website owner it should be your aim to not only make your website user friendly but also make it server friendly. We personally suggest you to focus on reducing loading time of your website. If your website loads fast then it will also be loved by those who have slower internet connections and Search engine algorithms also consider your site’s load time. Let’s have a look on how we can reduce and optimize website loading time.

Choose good web hosting

• Known to all, better service may come at a higher price. Faster web hosting may not come cheap. Actually there are many good web hosting available. Some are reasonable cheap and fast too. We are using Siteground web hosting which we find best for us right now.

Clean and Organize Codes

• Codes include php code, css, javascript, HTML and etc. Remove unnecessary codes, empty lines and comments ( you can do this easily by using minify and compress service available online)
• No broken links. Broken links will have negative effect on loading times such as 404 error and etc.
• Reduce or prevent use of redirection. Redirection made the browser load new url every time redirection happens.
• Use backslash at the end of link. Backslash reduces the server’s website identification and location time. It helps server to locate the target immediately.
•     Use CSS shorthand: eg:

1 h1 { color: Blue; font-style: oblique; font-weight: bold; }
2 p { color: black; font-style: oblique; font-weight: bold;}
3 We can optimize this rule into a single line like this:
4 h1, p { color: black; font-style: oblique; font-weight: bold; }

• Organized references. Put stylesheet references at the top so that it loads first, and other scripts at the bottom so that it loads later. CSS stylesheet loads faster than scripts.

Focus more on Content Area

• More text, less images. More text will load the page faster as text are more readable than images.
• Avoid the use of video and audio. Video and audio is known having bigger size. The bigger the size, the slower it loads.
• Prefer text links over buttons (if require, don’t use image button, use CSS button). It loads faster.
• You can use jQuery Lazy Loading if require lots of images to load. It will load images only on sections where you view the web.

Optimize Images

• Define height and width.
• Compress images size while still retaining the original quality.
• Use the right format where PNG and GIF for logo, Jpeg for content images.
• Avoid scaling down on images in html. Scale the image itself using image editor.
• Use CSS sprites with combined images.

Optimize Files

• Minify and compress files such as javascripts, videos, audios, etc. If your videos and flash files are of lesser size then they will also take less bandwidth.

Minimize http requests

• Use CSS sprites on images. CSS sprites will call only single request while serving many images in one single image file.
• Less external request (iframes and external files). Eg: Facebook, twitter follows etc.
• Combines styles, scripts into less files. Eg; Two stylesheets can combine into single stylesheet. Thus reducing http request.

Cache Web Pages

• When you cache your page, it saves a static version of it to be presented to the user browser instead of recreating it every time it’s requested. Loads slow only first time and faster next.
• For WordPress, check out WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. Drupal core has native caching.

Use CDN

• This totally can reduce page loading time by serving the web files from various locations, thus increase user interaction. Web files will be served from the nearest location node to visitors.
• We are using the combination of WordPress W3 Total Cache and MaxCDN.

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