Last updated on September 5th, 2024 at 05:11 am
It is important to make your website load faster in order to improve website performance and reduce loading time of website. Here’s how to speed up web page loading time to improve customer experience and increase conversion rates.
How To Make Your Website Load Faster
Here are 10 ways to make your website load faster even with pictures. After you speed up your website, you may want to use a reporting software to monitor the key metrics about your website/application such as signups, traffic, sales, revenue, etc. using dashboards & charts, to ensure everything is working well.
1. Use a CDN
If your website gets a lot of traffic, then it is advisable to host your static files such as images, videos, css, js, etc on a third-party CDN (content delivery network). CDNs have a global network of servers across the world and deliver your files from the server located closest to the user. They also offer data replication and redundancy.
Bonus Read : How to Change NGINX Port Number
2. Use Caching
One of the most effective ways to load your website faster is to cache your content. When users visit your website, they get to see the cached version of your content unless it has changed since their last visit. There are multiple ways to cache content. You can cache your website content on users’ browsers, or your own servers. Similarly, you can cache specific file types, or requested URLs of your website, instead of caching everything. Here’s how to enable server caching in Apache. You can also enable web browser caching.
3. Optimize Images
One of the most important ways to load your website faster is to optimize your website images. Most of the data on web pages is due to images. If you optimize your website images, then it can save a lot of data bandwidth and speed up your website.
Don’t use high-resolution images on your website. Limit image resolution to 800px x 600px since people only skim through images on their phone/laptop these days.
If you have multiple images on a web page, combine them into a single CSS sprite which is loaded only once. Multiple images cause multiple requests and slow down your website.
Also, try some of the new image formats like webp or JPEG XR that reduce file sizes by up to 50%. Also, prevent image hotlinking to block other sites from requesting images to your site.
Bonus Read : How to Install mod_evasive to Protect Your Website Against DDOS
4. Compress your content
If you want to make your website load faster, then don’t send your data (files, images, etc) as-is. Most web servers such as Apache & NGINX allow you to compress data using GZIP compression before sending response to users’ browsers. Browsers can automatically uncompress GZIP format and render original information for users. Here’s how to enable GZIP in Apache.
Similarly, minify your static files such as JS, CSS using a minifier tool which automatically removes unnecessary characters, line breaks, and replaces multi character variable names with single character ones, reducing their size by up to 60%.
5. Optimize Response Headers
Your web server’s response headers play a crucial role to make your website load faster. If you enable keep-alive HTTP headers for your server, then the browser won’t establish a new connection for every request it sends to your server. It will use the same connection to get multiple files. So your server will keep the connection open when a user is on your website, to serve multiple requests, thereby saving processing time and network latency.
Similarly, by default, when a user visits your website, then the website files are saved on their browser, so that they can be loaded quickly if they revisit your website. However, they are stored for only up to 24 hours, based on the files’ response headers. You can set the expiration date in response headers to be more than 24 hours, or even forever. So whenever a person visits your website, most of your website files will be quickly loaded from their browser itself.
Hopefully, the above tips will help make your website load faster. You can also use them to make website load faster in WordPress. By the way, if you want to create charts & dashboards to monitor your business or website, you can try Ubiq. We offer a 14-day free trial.
Sreeram Sreenivasan is the Founder of Ubiq. He has helped many Fortune 500 companies in the areas of BI & software development.