5 Proven Ways to Optimize Your Website’s Speed


Do you think that speed of your website doesn’t matter? Consider again. A slower website can lose you new customers, yield less traffic and destroy user satisfaction. Moreover, it can also take a toll on your SEO rankings as Google takes in account your site speed while ranking it.

It’s clear that site speed is vital not only for SEO, but to keep with your profits high as well.

Here are some well known methods to rev up your website.

Compress Your Resources:

Compression is an easy to way to increase your website’s speed and save bandwidth. Compression reduces the size of the data sent from your server to the client (browser).

Whenever your users open a page, the server is asked to deliver the requested files. The bigger these files are, the longer it would take for the page to load. Compression drastically improves page speed by compressing the resources before delivering them to the client.

Here’s a nice guide on this: https://is.gd/7xwbeN.

Use a CDN to Deliver Resources:

CDN is a network of geographically distributed servers. Each server caches the static content (such as CSS, Javascript, images) of the website.

Whenever users hit your website, they are connected to the nearest server in closeness to their location to download the static content. This ensures a short distance between the CDN server and user, reducing the latency and enhancing the user experience by providing a fast website.

Here’s a guide on setting up CDN for your website: https://is.gd/WV5NCR

Reduce Server Response Time:

Server response time is the amount of time that your web-server takes to respond to a HTTP request.

Optimizing your server response time is highly necessary because no matter how fast your pages are, if your web-server fails to respond on time, your website will show slow.

Server response time depends upon resource consumption, web-server optimization, quality of your web-host and power of server hardware.

Here’s how to reduce your server response time: https://is.gd/vhLYii

Reduce & Combine HTTP Requests:

When a user opens your website, most of their time is spent in loading different pieces of your website (such as CSS, Javascript, images, fonts, etc.).

A HTTP request is made for each one of these resources, the more HTTP requests, the longer it takes for the page to render.

The quickest way to speed up your website is to reduce the HTTP requests. Furthermore, you can also combine some files together. For instance, you can create a single file for two or multiple CSS files. The same case applies for Javascript too.

You may also use inline CSS to save on HTTP requests.

Here’s a decent guide by HubSpot on this topic: https://is.gd/Wuo1kk

Implement Browser Caching:

Implementing browser caching can make your website faster, a lot faster. By enabling browser caching, you can speed up your website drastically.

Every time a browser opens your website, it has to download all the files of your website. These files are then stored at their local storage, and when they request an other page, these files are already in their storage and ready for reuse.

Page load speed can be optimized by requesting the client browsers to store and reuse the files delivered by your server.

More on this topic by Moz: https://is.gd/EWBv9g

These are some general proven methods to optimize your website’s speed. There are many other ways to optimize your website depending upon the CMS you use, the language you use, and other factors.