Tips To Improving Website Runtime

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Many website owners don’t realize just how vital speed is to the success of their site. Today’s internet user is incredibly impatient thanks to the vast array of options at their disposal. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, more than half of visitors will abandon the page. That’s a massive blow to your conversions goal.

Worse still, even the visitors who choose to stick around may be less enthusiastic about coming back in future. Logically, the faster your website is, the greater the odds of a visitor making a purchase or following through on your call to action. Here are a couple of tips on speeding up your site’s runtime.

Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests

A substantial proportion of a web page’s load time goes toward downloading the different elements of the page such as images, scripts and stylesheets. A HTTP request must be made for each element which means that the more the components a page has, the higher the number of HTTP requests and therefore the longer it takes to render.

To minimize HTTP requests, start by checking how many requests the page makes. On Google Chrome, you can see that by right-clicking the page and going to the Inspect menu. Once you know the number of requests, you can then look at the elements of your page and see which ones you can do without.

Combine and Compact Files

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You can minimize HTTP requests by combining and compacting your page’s Javascript, CSS and HTML files. These files are crucial since they are primarily responsible for your page’s structure and appearance. But having too large and too many of these files will significantly drag down page load speed.

You are especially likely to run into this problem if you used a template website builder to create your site. Website builders often lead to messy, bulky underlying code. Another factor in element file size is the framework you choose to use).

Compacting the files implies getting rid of superfluous code, whitespace, indentation and line breaks. Combining files takes a lot more effort but if you are on WordPress, plugins like WP Rocket can make the process much easier. After compacting and combining files, take a look at the HTTP requests to confirm the work has delivered the desired benefits.

Reduce Image Size

Images are often the largest files on a web page. The larger your image files, the longer your page’s load time. Getting rid of images altogether may not be a viable solution since images can drive up conversions and reduce the text needed to explain a subject. You can however improve page performance by reducing the size of the files.

There are several ways you can compress images. First, images sometimes contain plenty of needless space. You can get rid of this space by cropping images to just the right size. Second, you can reduce file size by converting to a compressed file format. For example, if you have files in BMP format, converting the images to JPEG format could reduce the file size by 90 percent or more.

Defer Loading Javascript

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Javascript gives your website a dynamism that is extremely difficult to achieve using HTML alone. But this dynamism comes at a price especially as regards page load time. You can minimize the negative impact of Javascript on user experience by deferring loading of Javascript files until other elements have already been rendered.

For WordPress sites, the WP Rocket plugin can simplify the process of deferring Javascript files. Just check the ‘Load JS files deferred’ box and your work is done. If your site is built on HTML, you’ll have to call an external Javascript file right before the page’s </body> tag.

Switching to a Better Host or Hosting Plan

The majority of first time website owners will go for the cheapest hosting plan they can find. The rationale is to avoid risking too much money in the project while there’s no certainty that the website will still be active one year from launch. While the low cost plans may serve the purpose at the beginning, you’ll need to upgrade as the site sees a steady rise in traffic.

Hosting plans usually fall into three categories—shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting and dedicated server hosting. Shared hosting plans are the cheapest and start from a couple of dollars a month. VPS plans involve sharing a physical server but server resources are segregated into numerous virtual spaces with each space accessible to only one customer.

In dedicated server plans, the customer is exclusively allocated a physical server. Naturally, dedicated server hosting is the most expensive but it also provides the best performance for high traffic websites.

Improving your website’s runtime is a never ending task. Since your web pages are likely to experience regular changes to content and/or structure, you have to constantly confirm that your pages’ load time is optimized.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —