Ways To Reduce The Loading Time Of Your Website | Set 2
Prerequisite: Ways To Reduce The Loading Time Of Website | Set 1 In the above article, we described four methods, namely:
- Optimize Images
- Minify JavaScript and Style Sheets
- Enable Compression
- Browser Caching
In this article, we shall explore five more ways to reduce the loading time of your website.
1. Prioritize Above-the-fold Content This generally refers to loading your JavaScript files after the rest of the page loads. Loading these scripts before leads to a lot of waiting time, and we know, how much your visitors love waiting. The simplest solution to this, is to include these files at the bottom of your page, just before the closing body tag. The CSS of your website could be split into two parts: an inline part that styles above-the-fold content, and an external part that can be deferred.
2. Do away with Unnecessary Plugins Using too many plugins slows down your website to a great extent, resulting in crashes and other technical difficulties. Therefore, it is advised to deactivate or delete the unnecessary plugins. A case study by Mike (http://startbloggingonline.com/speed-up-wordpress/) shows how he decreased his website speed from 4.23 seconds to 1.33 seconds. Plugins contributed to a whopping 86% of the load time.
3. Minimize Redirects Redirects lead to additional HTTP requests, increasing the load time. Thus, keeping these redirects to a minimum is desirable. For responsive websites, you may want the users to be redirected to a mobile version of the site. As per Google, we may perform the following actions to make sure a responsive direct does not slow your site:
- A HTTP redirect may be used to take the mobile user agents to the equivalent URL without intermediate redirects.
- The markup may be included in your webpages to specify your mobile equivalent URL, so that Googlebot can discover your mobile pages.
4. Use Content Delivery Network Content Delivery Network is a system of distributed servers, which delivers web content based on the user’s geographical location. Access to your site from a faster server near your user’s geographical location will greatly reduce the loading time. Popular Content Delivery Networks include:
- MaxCDN
- CloudFlare
- Incapsula
- Edgecast
- Amazon CloudFront
You can click here to find simple steps so as to set up Amazon S3 with CloudFront as your Content Delivery Network. 5. Avoid Self-Hosted Videos Video files are often very large, and uploading them to your site can be real sluggish. Instead third party video hosting services like YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia may be used. All you need to do is copy a small bit of code that they furnish, and you paste it into your post or webpage. In the present era, online users prefer a richer online experience. There will be flashier JavaScript, CSS tricks and other third-party analytics that will tend to increase the size of our sites. But we need to tackle this well, and should not be hampered by it. Know well: a one-second delay is all it takes to lose a lead. References:
- https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/speed-up-your-website/
- https://www.truconversion.com/blog/conversion-rate-optimization/9-tips-to-reduce-page-load-time-and-improve-website-speed/
- http://cubewires.com/insights/reduce-web-page-load-time/
This article is contributed by Nihar Ranjan Sarkar. If you like GeeksforGeeks and would like to contribute, you can also write an article using write.geeksforgeeks.org or mail your article to review-team@geeksforgeeks.org. See your article appearing on the GeeksforGeeks main page and help other Geeks. Please write comments if you find anything incorrect, or you want to share more information about the topic discussed above.
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