You need to improve the speed of your website if you want to easily reach your target. Indeed, with the number of websites online, users are generally spoilt for choice. Therefore, when your website takes several seconds to display, you are not likely to have much visibility. A study by Think With Google has shown that many users will not return to your website if the loading time exceeds six seconds. In this article, we will see 10 key steps to improve the speed of a website.
During the development process of a website, it is possible to put in place a set of measures to facilitate the optimization of the speed. Indeed, If at the base your website does not respect a set of standards, you could spend a lot of time and money on adjustments. Among the elements considered, we can mention the points below.
When you subscribe to a subscription with a hosting provider, the features it offers potentially limit your scope of action. Indeed, some shared servers give you access to very few features. Therefore, using an application that takes more resources than the provided server does not facilitate the task. So, when you shop for a web host,
Of course, the options you need might have a certain cost. Therefore, it is crucial not to neglect to put a considerable budget for the acquisition of a web server.
Many companies tend to seek the development of discount solutions. This has an impact on the quality of the product they receive. Before your website goes online, you must complete a set of validations. Among the validations, we can recommend:
If you want to improve the loading time of your website, these are the elements you need to monitor.
The quality of your web server plays a crucial role in the loading time of your website. Indeed, a server that does not have the necessary resources for the website creation application can have an impact on the loading time. For this, when choosing a web server, be sure to check that all options are in place. Among other things, you can look at the prerequisites of your application to compare.
If your website is of poor quality or depends on certain tools that do not promote optimization, you may have trouble improving. You should make sure that your website is of excellent quality. In this case, we could already talk about:
Images are often the main cause of websites slowing down. It is important to optimize their size and format to make them lighter. In addition, you can use online tools to compress images without loss of quality or use image compression plugins for CMS like WordPress.
To better optimize images, you need to decide on the right formats as needed. Indeed, PNG formats usually weigh more than JPG or WebP. However, in some cases, PNG formats are preferable to JPG. As an example, if you want to add photos in a section that has a different color than the photo, you could use the PNG with a transparent background.
Cache services allow you to store a registered version of your website to make it more quickly accessible to visitors. This can be especially useful for high-load sites. Below are some examples of cache services:
Code minification is about removing unnecessary spaces, line breaks, and comments from your code to reduce its size and improve page loading times. Obviously, there are online tools for this. If you use a CMS like WordPress, you can install extensions to minify your HTML, CSS, and JS code. Below are some examples on WordPress:
WP Minify: WP Minify is a WordPress plugin that lets you minify the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code of your site. It can also combine multiple files into one to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
Autoptimize: Autoptimize is a WordPress plugin that allows you to minify and combine CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files of your website. It offers other features, such as Gzip compression and caching.
Fast Velocity Minify: Fast Velocity Minify is another WordPress plugin that lets you minify the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code of your site. In addition, it offers features for caching and file compression.
Better WordPress Minify: Better WordPress Minify is a WordPress plugin that allows for minifying the CSS and JavaScript files of your site.
W3 Total Cache: W3 Total Cache is a WordPress caching plugin that offers features for the minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files. It is often considered one of the best caching plugins for WordPress.
CDN (Content Delivery Networks) are networks of servers distributed worldwide. They allow the distribution of the files of your website (images, videos, scripts) from the server closest to the user, which reduces the loading time of the pages.
You can also optimize your web server by using techniques such as GZIP compression, which reduces the size of files sent to the browser, or by enabling server-side cache.
Plugins can weigh down your website and slow down page loading times. It is therefore important to remove unnecessary plugins and limit their use to the strictly necessary.
Heavy themes can slow down your website. It is then crucial to choose a light theme optimized for speed.
Redirects can increase page loading time. It is therefore essential to avoid them as much as possible.
By following these tips, you should be able to significantly improve the speed of your website
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