Imagine you need to buy a last-minute gift for your friend at an online store. You’re trying to open the website, but it goes on loading and loading, and loading…like forever. What are you going to do? You will leave the website and go to another one, where you will make your order more quickly and without any interruptions. Consumers have no time to waste. And you have no consumers to “waste” too!

The simple truth is that speed matters. A faster loading website will bring you more traffic and higher conversion rates. Did you know that if your website does not load within 3 seconds, more than half of its visitors will leave it?

 

Why do you need to improve your website speed?

• Website speed is essential for Google ranking.
• Consumers prefer fast-loading pages.
• The better the speed of your website, the higher your user satisfaction.
• Speed affects Bounce rates (the percentage of users that leave a site without looking at a second page)
• The faster your page loads, the more people will visit it.
• And more.

So, it seems rather obvious that a fast website equals a successful website. And now what?

 

How can I check my website speed?

Here are a few platforms that can help you analyze and optimize your website speed:

• PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom
• GTmetrix

How do I increase my website speed? Here are some of our suggestions:

 

1. A trusty web hosting provider

The very first (and most important) thing is choosing the right web hosting provider.  The server on which all your precious data will be stored must be reliable, not jam-packed and able to respond quickly to requests.  Speedflow offers high quality hosting with lightning-fast performance:

• SSL certificates
• Linux server environment
• Customization and scalability
• Connectivity all over the world
• 24/7 support
• And more

 

2. Gzip compression

The bigger a web page, the longer it takes to load. When a user clicks on a link, the server receives an automatic command to begin loading all page elements. If these items are too big, it will take a lot longer to visualize them in the user’s browser. Gzip compression solves this problem.

Gzip compresses the elements of your site into a zip file, thanks to which your web page information reaches the user’s browser much faster. Most servers provide this type of compression. To check if your website employs Gzip compression, try these tools here or just type in the search engine search bar “gzip compression checker” and check any of the first few results.

To enable Gzip compression on your server, use the following modules:

• For Apache: mod deflate
• For Nginx: HttpGzipModule
• For IIS: HttpCompression

 

3. Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is extremely useful because it allows your page elements to load at different times – only when the user actually needs to see them. Choose the parts of your website that have to be loaded with priority and those that can be loaded after the user scrolls down to them. Lazy Loading has many advantages. It:

• Reduces page loading time
• Saves bandwidth
• Improves user experience.

 

4. Image optimization

If you optimize the images on your page the right way, you can improve your website speed by 80%! Light images are mandatory for any site, and often is a neglected step in eCommerce website development where they play a very important role in sales. Try the following tips:

• Format your images before uploading them online.
• The best image format is the JPEG format.
• Avoid using BMP and TIFF formats.
• Your image size should match the width of your page. If your page width is 570 pixels, so should your image width too.
• Decrease color depth to a minimum, only if it does not distort the image.
• Eliminate all white spaces around your images.

 

5. Cache your browser

Caching allows browsers to remember your website after it has been loaded on them even only once. Consequently, the browser will not have to reload all the items from the server again. On the contrary, it will load the information directly from the user’s local computer. This is an extremely useful feature especially for regular users because the website will load much quicker with every subsequent visit.

So, how can you enable this feature? First, you need to adjust your HTTP headers and indicate the expiry times of specific file types. Thus, the browser will know whether to request information from the server or from the browser cache. Keep in mind that your CMS system may also have cache extensions or plugins. If not, you can enter cache parameters in your .htaccess file (in the root of the domain). This will help the browser know which files to cache. If all this seems like a foreign language to you, contact us or send us an e-mail at info@speedflow.bg. We will help you enable your browser cache.

How about your website? Is it fast enough? Do you need to increase its speed? We can show you how to turn on the “turbo” immediately.

 

Check also “How to improve your website speed? – Part 2“

Today we present you the second article of our “How to improve your website speed” series.  A faster website leads to better UX. So, here is what you should do:

 

1. Reduce HTTP requests

HTTP is a protocol through which the browser requests a file to be loaded, and the server sends this file to the browser. Having fewer requests will considerably improve your website speed. To reduce them:

• Combine as many CSS/JS files as possible into one or at least into a few
• Try to reduce scripts and position them at the bottom of the page
• Remove any unnecessary images and reduce the size of the rest

 

2. Reduce (optimize) resources (CSS/HTML/JS files)

The next step of speeding up your site is to eliminate all unnecessary data. Why? Because it negatively affects the way in which browsers processes resources. Therefore:

• Eliminate empty spaces, redundant lines, comments and formatting, unused codes, etc.
• Use shorter variables and functions.

Thus both browsers and search engines will process HTML, CSS and JavaScript files much quicker.

 

3. Use fewer plugins

You want to optimize your website and enhance its features, you add plugins. But at one point it becomes slower. Having too many plugins can create technical problems such as bugs, system, crashes and even compromise your web security. So, you need to clean them up! Disable those you don’t use or don’t need anymore. Do the same for the ones that hinder the speed of your website the most after a check-up.

Tip: Do a speed test after every plugin deactivation. See how your speed has improved. Thus, you will optimize your website speed more effectively.

 

4. Load CSS files asynchronously

Typically, browsers block the rendering of a web page until all of its external CSS files have been downloaded completely.  They might even display a blank page until the download is finished.  This is also a possible reason for the low speed of your site.

While there are several well-known techniques for loading JavaScript and Images asynchronously when it comes to CSS files the question is often overlooked. We recommend you to try LoadCSS – a quite handy plugin with very good user reviews.

 

5. Remove all query strings

Query strings are those URLs that contain the “?” And “&” symbols. Unfortunately, CSS and JavaScript resources with such strings are not cached by most proxy servers. This also affects the speed of your website and you need to remove all of them.

You can do this, using plugins such as:

• Remove Query Strings From Static Resources
• W3 Total Cache
• Query Strings Remover

or manually:

• Insert the following code into the functions.php file of your WordPress theme:

// * TN – Remove Query String from Static Resources

function remove_css_js_ver ($ src) {

if (strpos ($ src, ‘? ver =’)

$ src = remove_query_arg (‘ver’, $ src);

return $ src;

}

add_filter (‘style_loader_src’, ‘remove_css_js_ver’, 10, 2);

add_filter (‘script_loader_src’, ‘remove_css_js_ver’, 10, 2);

 

6. Specify the character set

“Character set” is the set of symbols used by a website. When someone visits a site, the first thing the browser does is to determine which character set it uses. Thus, browsers are able to successfully display web content to the user. If you don’t specify your character set in advance, the browser has to figure it out alone. And eventually, it will. However, if you want your content to be displayed immediately, you have to have a character set specified.

Where: The HTTP response headers

Example: Content-Type: text / html; charset = utf-8

 

7. Try a CDN

CDN is a content delivery network which helps users located in different parts of the world retrieve web content (usually images and Javascript) in a fast and efficient way.  If your website is international – try a CDN. If not, we don’t recommend you to use one, as it may worsen your website speed.

 

We hope to have helped you improve your website speed with these tricks. Stay tuned as “How to improve your website speed? – Part 3“ is a fact!