Easy Ways To Help Reduce Your Website Loading Speed

Your Website Loading Speed impacts your search ranking

Your website loading speed, as you may know, heavily affects your organic search rankings seeing that Google accounts for a site speed in its algorithm. So what’s the catch? Your site’s ‘size’ is actually the biggest factor that contributes to your page speed.

Though patience is a virtue, this tenet may hardly find a place over the internet, especially when you work in a fast-paced virtual environment. A second delay can definitely tip the scale, tremendously cutting pageviews, curbing customer satisfaction and drastically dropping conversions.

Browsers take time downloading the code which makes up your site’s page. It needs to download the page’s HTML, stylesheets, scripts and images. It can really take a while downloading all these data, which is a bit frustrating.

Because web users expect very engaging site designs, the size of your site’s resource files continues to grow. With every new feature that requires new stylesheet or script, your site is weighed down just a little more.

So how will you see to it that your site is up to speed? Here’s the answer! Some of the most popular resources for analyzing the speed of your site include GTMetrix, Website Grader, Insights, and Google’s PageSpeed. They will help you analyze your site and where it lags behind.

Here are some essential solutions to reduce your website loading speed that webmasters should know to easily speed things up.

Optimize Your Site’s Images

Needless to say, the most common bandwidth hogs on the web are images. Scaling them appropriately is the first way to optimize your website’s images.

A number of webmasters make use of huge images and then scale them down with CSS without realizing that the browser still loads these images at full size. For instance, if a ‘1000 x 1000 pixels’ image is scaled down to 100 x 100 pixels, the browser still loads ten times more. So before uploading images to your site, scale them first.

Compressing the images is another way to optimize them.

There are quite a number of free image compression tools you can find over the internet, like tinypng.com. These free image compression tools can perfectly reduce the sizes of your images without having to lose their quality. Size reductions are available from 25% to 80%!

Browser Caching

Never let the visitors download the same things whenever they load a page. When you enable browser caching, some data will be temporarily stored on a visitors’ computer. Thus, your visitors won’t feel frustrated as they wait for it to load whenever they visit your page.

In addition, your website visitors’ browser configuration along with your server-side cache settings determines how long you can store the data on their computers.

Optimize Your CSS

Before your visitors can see your site, your CSS loads, and the longer it takes for visitors to download your CSS means the longer they have to wait. This can be a bit irksome on their part. However, when your CSS is optimized, your files will download a lot faster, allowing your visitors for a much quicker access to your site.

When you don’t use all of your CSS, consider getting rid of the superfluous code in your files, which can really cause your website’s snail-pace speed.

After that, minimize your CSS files. Extra spaces in your CSS increase file size. Minimizing your CSS gets rid of extra spaces from your code, ensuring your file is at its smallest size possible.

So how do you actually perform CSS minimization?

Check first if your CMS has already minimized your CSS. See if there is an available option for it. You may also use a free online service, such as csscompressor.com if your CMS doesn’t have a minimize CSS option. This can be easily done by pasting in your CSS, and then hit ‘Compress’ to view the newly minimized stylesheet. Without a doubt, minimizing your resource files is a sure-fire way to curb some size of your files.