Website Performance or Web Optimization refers to the speed of the website or making the website as fast as much, which includes the slow loading pages, issues like error 404 or crawling mistakes and to overcome these problems, it measures the user experience when they visit the website.
Users want speed as well as convenience from the website they visit, and if you provide a well optimized website to the users then it increases your chances to rank high on the search engines like ‘Google’, the well optimized website helps users to find your website more easily on the search engine which builds customer loyalty.
How to Maintain or Increase the Website Performance?
- Minimize HTTP request
According to some reports almost 80% of websites take a lot of time to open its different pages, images, scripts or sometimes the whole site.
The first step in this process is to identify how many of your sites make an HTTP request as a benchmark. If you are a user of Google Chrome then you can use developer tools to check this then go to the page you want to analyze and click on the right button and select inspect then click the “network” tab.
2. Minify and combine files
Now you know how many HTTP requests your site makes, then your work is to reduce that number and you can start these things with JavaScript file, HTML and CSS.
These are very essential files because they determine the appearance of your site, it also adds the number of requests when users visit the website. By ‘minify’ and combining the files you can reduce that number it reduces the each file size as well as the number too. Minifying the files removes the white space, code and unnecessarily formatting.
3. Reduce the size of image
Most of the websites take a lot of time to open due to heavy images used inside it pages or in different parts of the site, make sure you should use an appropriate size images. You can use WebP, JPeg XR to reduce the weight of the images you will use without decreasing its quality.
Best ways to reduce the size of images are:
- With the help of any editor reduce the actual size of the images.
- To reduce the roundtrip combining images into CSS sprites it’s a very useful technique which combines used images into the file and reduces the number of HTTP requests to download the webpage.
4. Use of CDN( Content Delivery Network)
One of the best ways to boost the speed of your website is to host your media file in the Content Delivery Network which will divide the number of requests your site makes and can save 60% of bandwidth.
CDN hosts your media file across the huge network of servers around the globe, in most of the reason user visit the only site and download the file from the server which is very close to them because the bandwidth has been across spread to different servers and reduces the load and protect the server or sites from DDos (Daniel-of-service-attack).
5. Reduce server response time
DNS (Domain name system) is a server with IP address, database and with associated hostnames different users uses different browser (chrome, Mozilla Firefox or safari) when the users type URL in any browser they uses domain server automatically translate URL into IP address which indicates location online.
6. Choose the right host
Most of the new site owners go through with the cheapest host option as possible and it is enough for the beginning but it is essential to upgrade your host when incoming traffic starts coming in your site and choose the best web host with the greater reviews.
The three best web hosting are:
- Shared hosting- It is the cheapest option for a new site or the site owner has to pay 5 dollars per month to use it’s service. It does struggle to secure the website from different issues and this is the service for which you have been paid.
- VPS hosting- VPS ( virtual private server ) hosting is relatively cheaper and more secure than shared hosting which secures your website with traffic spikes and improves the performance of the website.
7. Enable Compression
When your files are relatively smaller, the speed of your loading page will increase. To reduce the load time of your website page compression is the essential way to do that and in today’s world compressing with Gzip is considered as the standard practice.
Gzip is the software application which is considered as the easiest and best way to compress any file mostly used by the web servers or the browser to compress and decompress it’s content over the internet used mostly on text files and codes, it can reduce the size of HTML, CSS and JavaScript upto 90%.
8. Enable browser caching
If you visit a website or a specific page your cache in the hard drive or temporary storage will store the elements of the page you visit. It helps the users when they visit again to that website or page browser will load the page without sending HTTP request to the server.
When the users visit any specific website or page their browser will take time to download its JavaScript files, images, stylesheet and HTML document but once you had loaded some pages the component of that page saved by your cache in the hard drive and only few component will have to download for the subsequent visit.
Conclusion
website performance is the measurement of the speed of the web pages and if not, so improve the performance of the website because each and every user wants that the loading time should be less from the website they visit on a regular basis. So there are different ways to improve the performance of the website which is given above hopefully it will help you to improve your website performance.
