How to Increase the Speed of a Website?

Site running slow? Here are some of the tips and tricks that will help you to get your site to perform faster.

Updated: 14 Dec, 21 by Susith Nonis 7 Min

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Nowadays we won’t visit a site which takes ages to load. When there are so many options out there, why wait for something which is slow and takes time to load. Low site speed is one of the main reasons which reduces the traffic to your site. A few seconds will make a huge difference. If your site doesn’t load within 2 seconds, then say goodbye to more than half of your visitors. So in this guide, we will consider all of the required details on how to increase the speed of a website and help you increase your website’s speed easily.

As we know, Google considers loading speed as an important factor while ranking a website, so the website's speed has a significant role in the performance. Majorly Google considers both web and mobile load time, and mobile users also have a major role in ranking up the website on the search engine. Hence, it is important to lower down the website loading speed for both web and mobile users as it can improve your website's ranking and visibility. 

There can be various reasons behind the low loading speed because it can be a server issue or image size or redirects of your websites. It means you need to consider different criteria to achieve a perfect load time for your website. In the next section of this guide, you will get to know about different ways you can use to increase your website's speed. 

There are multiple ways to increase your website's speed easily, so let's have a brief look at these ways: 

Keep Pages Simple

The essential thing you can do is make your website's web pages simple and optimize. For appropriate load time, your web page should consist only of the main things required on it. Don't add many social media redirects or YouTube links that are not needed for the specific page. Always keep your web pages simple, and this will keep them fast and increase the website's speed.

Compress Images

Before uploading any images, make sure to compress all your images because it can affect your website's speed, and the majority of the time on websites is spent on loading images. Hence, try to compress the images from Photoshop to keep the quality of the image intact. If you don't have Photoshop, then don't worry because there are many free tools online to get the job done.

Optimize CSS, JavaScript and HTML

There is no doubt that codes play an important role for any website, and if there are any issues with the codes of a website, then it can create major problems for the website's performance. So try to optimize your website's code by removing commas, spaces, or any unnecessary characters and reducing your code files' size before uploading by compressing them

Asynchronous Loading

You can set up your CSS and JavaScript files to load together because it saves a lot of time rather than waiting for the codes to load one after the other (synchronously). Something to consider is to fix the code so that when the code is loading synchronously, keep it hierarchically. 

Sometimes a part of code won't load unless a specific part of the code is loaded. To fix this, you will have to go through the report from webpagetest, at your page source, and find the elements being loaded in the wrong order. (We recommend using CSS at the top and JavaScript at the bottom).

Use a CDN

The full form of CDN is Content Delivery Network which is a network of servers located worldwide that caches content to be delivered to visitors. A CDN stores data of websites in different locations, and when a user accesses the site, it will be delivered from a server that is geographically closer to the user. This increases the efficiency and speeds up the site as the distance is reduced.  

For delivering the content faster on the internet, CDN works to distribute the assets required for content to loup like images, videos, JavaScript files, etc. CDN service is becoming popular, and many web traffic is distributed through CDNs, including traffic from Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and so on. 

Clean Up the Database

If you have created the website on WordPress, then the database can be a little bit messy because of the saved drafts, deactivated plugins, post revisions, and so on. However, WordPress offers a plugin called WP-Optimize that deletes all of the extra stuff not required in the database. 

Minimize Redirects

Redirects are necessary to navigate through the website and to other external places. But every link has a latency. We know it's not possible to not include any links, but only use all redirect links only when it's necessary. It can help a visitor to jump from one web page to another without having load time troubles. 

Use Third-Party Services to Host Videos

If you have a shared hosting service or want to keep your server neat and tidy, avoid adding videos to your server. This takes up more space from your server, and as a result, connections might be slow. The best solution is to upload your video on YouTube, Vimeo, or any third party and put that on your site. This makes your site faster, and the video won't face any latency while playing.

Increasing your site speed is not an easy thing to achieve, but it will have major impacts on your site overall once you're there. There are other ways to increase your site's speed, but these are the ones I think will make the greatest impact and can be implemented easily. Higher speed will increase SEO, increase your ranking on SERPs (i.e., search engine results pages), and visitor satisfaction means more traffic. 

Fast Response to Requests

When you get requests to your website, and there is a delay, there's also a problem. To check your site's response is to measure the TTFB (i.e., Time To First Byte). TTFB measures the time it takes for the server to provide the first byte of response after a request is made. There are many reasons for the speed to be slow, which can be found from the results of the test above.

Avoid Bad Requests

Broken links lead to more load times due to wasteful requests. Pay special attention to images also when you are fixing the broken links. Use the online broken link checker to check your broken links for free. If your website is up to date but has some broken links, it can cause user experience-related issues. Hence bad user experience can create ranking and visibility issues on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. 

So these were top ways you can use to increase the speed of a website to improve its visibility and ranking.  Ranking a website holds some of the important aspects and improves its speed to maintain your website’s speed for a better user experience. If you find our guide useful, then please do check more of them on our website. We also offer multiple services such as web hosting, VPS server, dedicated server, and many more.

Susith Nonis

Susith Nonis

I'm fascinated by the IT world and how the 1's and 0's work. While I venture into the world of Technology, I try to share what I know in the simplest way with you. Not a fan of coffee, a travel addict, and a self-accredited 'master chef'.