How to Optimize Your Load Time

How to Optimize Your Load Time

Creating and managing your own website has its fair share of advantages. You can publish all of your unique content here without much worry, and you aren’t restricted by the limitations social media. Your only problem is that your  website takes forever to load.

Speed up your website!

Your content and your design is spot on, but a snail-like page will most likely increase your site’s bounce rate and even lower engagement. What you need is to enhance your page load time and make it easier for your readers to interact with. And so, here  are a few ways you can optimize your site’s load time.

Test Site Speed

The first step to fixing the problem, is finding out what the problem is. To do that, you must first measure your site’s current speed. To do this, you’ll need a speed testing tool that will use remote servers to ping your website from around the world. That should get you a good idea on how fast your website loads for different users. Try to get a baseline speed by comparing the ping from different locations. You can use it later to help improve your website. You can find a free tool for this online, and will ask you for the site’s URL, and location where you want to ping it. 

Reduce Load

After you have established a baseline speed for your website, it is now time to start the optimization process. What you will want to do is to reduce the size of the webpage. Your goal should be to reduce the size by a few KBs or even MB. The three most effective ways to do that are as follows:

  • Optimize images. Optimizing the images on your webpage can really help reduce the overall size. This is recommended for those who run web pages that are image heavy like photography blogs. It will only reduce the image content, but will leave the visual part unscathed.
  • Minify Code. It is essentially removing all the white spaces in your code. Just by getting rid of the spaces, you have already reduced the size by 50 percent. The downside to this is that now, your code can be a little harder to read. But it is all worth it considering how much better your website can run.
  • Reduce number of HTTP Requests. Probably the most tricky of the three, in order to make sure this works, you have to make sure that all your scripts can work together and run properly even if they are compressed. To achieve this, you have two options: either you use a command line method, or simply run it against your JS files.

Speed up DNS 

DNS stands for Domain Name System. And when your website has a speedy DNS, you cut down the total load times immediately. The more preferred route is for webmasters to pay for a faster DNS service. However, not a lot of them bother to check out the differences in speeds. However there are ways to manipulate your DNS from the inside the code which can help reduce the load time:

  • DNS Prefetch. Allows you to pull extra scripts, images,videos and other resources and save them in a cache for later use.
  • This lets developers setup a DNS/TLS connection to reduce the load time

Add CDN 

A CDN, or a Content Delivery Network, is a network of servers that are positioned around the world. It mirrors your site’s static content which can include scripts, images, and stylesheets. This is ideal if your website gets a lot of international visitors. Say for example, your website is hosted in the US. If someone from Asia tries to visit your website, it will load a lot slower. However, if you have a CDN, the site can load faster and the Asian visitor is given a chance to view your website. 

These are just a few ways you can try and optimize your website’s load time.Remember that an optimized website gets more visitors, and can even play a role in getting you a better ranking on Google. If you want to know more about the ever changing trends in website design, Netgen has everything you need to know and more.