Having a website is elemental for every organization to harness the power of Internet for connecting with a wide spectrum of audience. But, developing just a basic website without anything unique or value-delivering for the users won’t be any good for a business as the competition is extremely fierce when we talk about online marketing. As revealed in the Web Server Survey of Netcraft in October 2021, there were a total of 1,179, 448,021 websites worldwide. So, you can understand that how much important it is for an entrepreneur to develop a high-performing and ROI-driven website for ensuring a continuous flow of user traffic.

Website without a substantial amount of user traffic doesn’t have any value, isn’t it! And considering the very same, what we all should focus on is to find out how to improve your website performance. To help you in this journey, this blog is here with everything discussed.

Optimize the images

To get started, you should focus on optimizing the images of your website. Trusted SEO experts can guide you about the different ways of optimizing them. You should also try to reduce the sizes to ensure that they aren’t affected the loading speed of website adversely. Some of the ways of image optimization are:

• Considering the SVG icons: Instead of using the PNG icons, you can always choose SVG icons as they are smaller in size and look good irrespective of the screen’s size. This means you don’t require any multiple icon sizes for different types of resolutions.

• Compressing the image files: You should also use different tools for reducing the file size of GIF, JPEG, and PNG images.

• Using the right dimensions: You should also try to save the images in the right dimension which, is being used on the website instead of depending on CSS or HTML for resizing them. This in turn, will help you to minimize the total image size, thereby improving the page’s loading time.

• Saving images in right format: Another tip which, you should consider is to save the images in the correct format. For instance, if you want an image to portray a photographic scene, then you should choose the JPEG format whereas, you should use the PNG format if looking for transparency.

Minify all the JavaScript and CSS documents

Minification is basically the process of removing all unneeded characters like source code comments, tabs, and spaces from source code for minimizing the file size. JavaScript and CSS files mostly contain white spaces, line breaks, and page breaks for making the codes more readable. But, this kind of formatting mostly increases the files’ sizes, thereby impacting the website’s performance adversely. By using a tool like Minify, you would be able to remove such line breaks and white spaces, thereby making these files much smaller.

Minimize the HTTP requests

For all the JavaScript and CSS files and other images on the website, the user’s browser needs to make an HTTPS or HTTO request on your website’s server. A number of similar requests add up to the website’s loading time, which delivers a not-so-satisfactory performance to visitors. This is why you should always try to minimize the total number of HTTP requests and following here are a few tips you must consider.

• Using CSS rather than images: Instead of using the images for dividers, horizontal lines, and backgrounds, consider using the CSS as it will help you in improving the website’s performance without compelling the users to wait for loading the images.

• Combining multiple JavaScript and CSS files: You should create one master file for all the JavaScript files and one for the CSS files. Then you must copy each of the JavaScript and CSS files separately into their respective master files.

Enable the Gzip compression

Another potential way of improving the website’s performance which you must consider is enabling the Gzip compression of your server. This will actually help you in compressing the CSS and HTML files on website before they were being sent to browser. Generally, the browser always checks whether the Gzip compression is being enabled or not and if it is done, then the visitor’s browser downloads the Gzip file instead of requesting to download the original CSS and HTML files.

Deploy a CDN

CDN or Content Delivery Network refers to the distributed computer network which, primarily delivers all the static files like CSS, JavaScript, and HTML and different types of video files and images on the basis of geographic locations. So, basically using a CDN helps you to load from the closest server to your visitors who are browsing your website.

Disable the query strings for all your static resources

Query strings refer to the suffixes being used at end of the URLs, which mainly start with special characters like ampersands and question marks. Their primary goal is to help you in identifying the specific versions of assets and get to know about the caching restrictions. Using the query strings will help you to identify the cache and compel the browser to load the file’s latest version.

Fix the broken URLs

Broken URLs can certainly be the reason of your website’s poor performance. Having a lot of broken URLs on the website might create problems, thereby preventing the search engine bots to index other critical web pages and affecting your customer base in long run. These URLs can even create impression that the website isn’t functioning properly, which in turn would drive away your visitors, thereby resulting in an increased bounce rate. Keeping this into consideration, you should try to crawl the website on regular intervals and check whether all the URLs are working properly.

Upgrade your hosting plan

If your website has increased in size and it has been receiving a substantial amount of web traffic, then it’s time for you to upgrade the hosting plan. By switching to a managed hosting plan or VPS, you will be able to have increased control over your server’s resources because of VPS access or hosting to website maintenance and optimized server configuration for holistic support.

The bottom line

Once all these changes have been implemented successful, you must try to test or evaluate the website’s performance and figure out the improvement in its loading speed. Also, you should rely on an experienced web developer who can not only guide you on how to improve your website performance and also further help you to test the efficacy of implementing suggested changes as well. This in turn, will help you in ensuring seamless functioning and performance of your website.

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