How to Make Website Load Faster

So many times bloggers alike have asked me how to make website load faster and today i have decided to threat this topic extensively so you too can make your website load faster. Search engines and site visitors love websites that load fast, when a website is slow to load the visitor may grow impatient and leave and thus increase your bounce rate which the search engine interprets as the webpage being less relevant for the search query and lowers your search engine rank.

In as much as many people now have access to high speed internet connections throughout the world, it is important to remember that there are people in some parts of the world who still have access to low speed internet. Other than the speed of connection, there are several factors which affect the pace of website loading.

Does your website take too long to load? Do you receive complaints about the speed of loading? Normally, a higher speed of loading encourages clients to read more and navigate easily because they don’t run out of patience. The benefits derived from a website that loads faster are invaluable. These are some of the effective ways to make website load faster:

How to make website load faster:

Spread Content over Many Pages: If your website content contains many graphics then it is not wise for you to display all of them in one page because it becomes too heavy. Items which tend to slow down the loading speed include an image gallery, blogs for updates, news and other items. Spreading them over different pages retains the content and improves the loading speed.

Optimize Images and Graphics: A website with videos, images and graphics is quite appealing to the user. However, many images and graphics have an effect on the website’s loading speed. You can therefore load images of lower quality because they are lighter. It has been found that the difference between low quality and high quality images is almost negligible. Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the WP Smush.it.

Use a Lighter Sidebar and Footer: Many websites and blogs use the footer and the sidebar in an attempt to showcase a number of widgets. Of course a dense sidebar slows the speed of loading of the website as it consumes a higher proportion of the server’s load. You can use the minimalistic design to increase the website’s loading speed. In case you have some widgets that are not very necessary then you can remove them. If you have numerous social bookmarking and sharing buttons then you can remove some of them or all of them to avoid overloading the server.

Must Read: Importance of Blog Design and Layout – Things You Should Know

Include a Caching Plugin: Many web designers view this particularly as the most important step applied in increasing the loading speed of the website. Blogs and sites supported by WordPress are particularly better off here because they are based on PHP, a language that enables more PHP calls to be executed when loading. This improves the loading speed. The plugin will cache your page and then store it in the form of an HTML file. There are many types of plugins. You can conduct research on the web in order to find out the one that is most suitable for your website. I personally use W3 Total Cache and its proven to be effective.

Use a Content Delivery Network: This is a service which improves the site’s loading time by progressively reducing the server load before offloading any static resources such as images, themes and content. There are several CDN service providers with different features depending on how fast you want your website to load. There are so many free and premium CDN out there you can i use. Last time in this blog i wrote an article titled “CloudFlare:Why every blogger should use this CDN“, i recommend you check it out and see how it can make your website load faster.

Must Read: Content Delivery Network CDN

Turn Off the Commenting Option: Such an option appears to be useless because comments enable your customers to ask questions about your products and services as they relay to you some relevant feedback. However, if viewers can’t open your website because of the loading speed then what’s the use? You could set up a separate blog where you can receive feedback and comments and then you redirect them there. Many comment systems use Java Script which consumes a lot of time in loading the server address.

Clear Off Excessive White Space: Set aside some time when you are in your moods and then have a look at your website. What do you see? Is there excess white space as a result of coding? You can run the code through and then clear all these space. It has an advantage of cutting some bytes of data from your webpage, thus ensuring that your webpage is lighter. This increases the loading speed.

Use the Cascading Style Sheets, CSS: A page which has been built with an external cascading style sheet actually loads faster than all the pages which have been designed via tables. The big advantage with CSS pages is that they display content on a page immediately as it begins to load. Hence, the viewer can read information at the top of the page before looking at other details down page. Since CSS applies to all the webpages, the viewer does not strain with new pages as this is automatic.

Minify JavaScript and CSS: Minifying your site’s Javascript and CSS will remove all unnecessary characters from code to reduce it size, this will greatly improve your site’s load time and thus make website load faster. This option is available on the W3 Total Cache plugin mentioned above.

Website Load Test:

Website load test is a test of how fast your website loads in real browser. Website load test will give you an insight of your page load speed and the files that cause a slow speed for your website. To make your website load faster you need to optimize it properly taking into consideration all the details from the Website load test result. Click here now for a free website load test.

I hope i have treated this topic “how to make website load faster” to your satisfaction, now i want you to apply the steps listed here to make your website load faster. Do you have any questions regarding any of the listed steps? Or you simply want to contribute to the topic? Please use the comment form below to share your views with me. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feeds.