10 Tips for Your Website Speed Optimization

A website is an integral part of your company’s branding, as it makes you reachable and provides information about your company. However, not all websites are created equal. Various factors make a website successful – good design, usability, accessibility, and content. These are just some of the aspects to Website Speed Optimization when creating the perfect website for your business. In this article, we’ll discuss a few basics you need to know for optimizing the speed of your website.

a. Choose a good host

It’s important to select a website hosting company that allows you to configure the site efficiently and provides an optimal speed for your WordPress website. There are a lot of hosts to start with for your website management. However, you should start from the bottom up, initially selecting a cheap host that has a basic speed. As technologies progress and the site grows, we recommend upgrading to a more advanced hosting service provider.

b. Minify your CSS, JavaScript

Css and JavaScript are huge files that get bigger if minified which means that all unnecessary characters and methods are removed from them. These files are the biggest contributor to the downloading time of your website. Minification is a process of removing all these unnecessary codes which speed up your website’s loading time and improves the overall user experience. Minification also helps search engines like Google and Bing to index faster your website. We used to host flat files, but nowadays CMSs allow you to minify these files by default.

c. Choose a good and optimized theme

It’s important to choose a well-optimized theme for your website. We recommend WordPress developer because it has a huge community of developers and can be easily switched for free if needed. Themes are used to create websites, but not all of them are as good as they seem on paper. They should be well-coded and optimized from the beginning to speed up the loading time and provide a good user experience. There are often bugs in the code that can take a lot of time to be fixed by developers.

Here are some tips to select the right theme:

1. Pick a clean, simple design with a background color that won’t clash with other sites.
2. Pick out plugins that will improve your site’s performance and usability such as the W3 Total Cache plugin
3. In WordPress, check the theme options screen to see how it was coded or in which language it was coded; some themes are better than others as far as speed and website speed optimization go.
4. Choose a free WordPress theme if you’re on a budget and want to test the waters first; don’t hesitate to upgrade to the paid plan if you like your theme and want it on your website now!

d. Keep your images small

The bigger your image size is, the more time it takes for them to load on the user’s browser. Accessing the server to download a big image takes too long and it’s more time-consuming. The smaller the file size, the more time it will take to download, so keep images small.

e. Optimize your HTTP headers and make sure they’re correct

When you upload an image to the server, it’s then added to your website as a file. These files are then compressed by the server and saved under a different name that differs from the original file name. It’s important to know these different names as they will be used by the browser to retrieve these files. By default, these names are usually sent in their original form, but if you want to change them, it’s important to do so because the header can affect how the images are displayed

f. Use an advanced cache mechanism

Caching is a fantastic tool that allows the browser to download a file only if needed. If this option is enabled, it will reduce the number of times that a file is accessed by the browser and will speed up uploading time. There are various caching options available like cache-busting or preloading.

g. Use a CDN(Content Delivery Network)

A CDN is a network of servers spread across the world. When you upload your images to the CDN, they will be accessed from all these servers instead of from only your local server and hence it reduces load time.

1) Google Cloud CDN

This feature gives benefits such as faster loading speed, web page caching, and faster page loading. It is an efficient feature to improve user experience by caching images from the users into their cache. It is highly recommended for high-traffic websites as it can compress files in a better way and can reduce overall online bandwidth usage.

2) Akamai CDN

Akamai CDN offers more ways of speeding up your website and provides better security. It helps to secure your website and can reduce online bandwidth usage along with improving loading speed. It offers custom SSL certificates which are a good security feature, as it can secure your website from malicious attacks.

h. Enable GZIP compression

GZIP compression is an excellent method of making your website faster by storing only what’s required and eliminating extra data. Maintaining files and combining them in the website can expand the size of your website and make it slow down. GZIP compression will be useful for your web pages, reducing file size without affecting the quality.

Accessibility is a reference term that is used to describe how people with disabilities can use a product or service. Accessibility, which is also known as Universal Design, is defined in strict, technical terms as “the design of a product or service so that it can be used by people with disabilities in line with their individual needs”.

i. Cleanup all the database

Small issues and problems can occur inside databases which can lead to a complete crash of the website. If you do not clean up all the issues, you might end up having significant downtime or even losing data. You must be aware of these common symptoms:

j. Disable hotlinking

This is a big security issue. Hotlinking allows external websites to “hotlink” your website and then steal your website data without your knowledge. It can lead to loss of reputation, trust, or financial damage. A hotlinked website will have a red ribbon and a lock icon placed next to the URL

Conclusion

We have reached the end of this article. We hope that after reading it, you have a clear understanding of website speed optimization. These are some easy tips that will help you to improve your website’s loading speed without spending much time and money. There are Shopify experts who will be able to work on your website management and get the speed optimized in just a few days. If you are willing to hire active Shopify experts then ControlF5 is always here with a helping hand.

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Email id:- contact@controlf5.in