9 Ways for Improving Your Website Speed

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9 Ways for Improving Your Website Speed
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• Fast loading website or web pages in particular
  is a really important website development
  strategy and should not be over looked by the
  webmasters, but why is it important?
• Why is Website Speed Important?
• Page load time is among the important factors for
  your traffic generation, users experience and
  the sites accessibility and functioning. Website
  speed impacts your website ranking by optimizing
  the search engine optimization even better.
• The website speed has a chain effect, because it
  impacts the Dwell Time and the Bounce Rate. Lets
  learn about these terms are and how they effect
  the SEO and user experience.
• Dwell Time means how much time a user is spending
  on your site. Website needs a quality content,
  that helps users in finding the required
  information and this attracts traffic.
• Lets say your site has the relevant information
  but it takes quite a while to load the content
  users will be disappointed and will leave your
  website.
• Keeping in mind that in this new era of high
  competition, you are not the only one having the
  required information, people will easily find new
  websites with the relevant information hence they
  will not think twice before leaving your website.

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• Moving on to the second part that has an impact
  on your websites traffic and SEO, Bounce Rate.
• Users leaving your website or web page in the
  first few seconds after being redirected is what
  we call Bounce Rate. This has a direct connection
  with your websites speed.
• Many users dont like being waited for the
  content to load, they get frustrated and will
  leave your site instantly if this happens.
  Therefore, webmasters are really considering
  website speed along with other important factors.
• Research has shown that a delay of only 1 second
  results in
• A decrease in page views by 11
• Customer satisfaction falls by 16
• Conversion rate falls by 7
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• Not only that but another research showed that
  47 of the internet users really expect to have
  website content loaded within first 2 seconds.
• Bounce rate increases to a 40 if page load time
  takes more than 3 seconds.
• Looking at these analytics, the website speed is
  pivotal but now the question stands is, how can
  we improve the website speed? Lets talk about
  it.

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• How to Improve Website Speed
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• Reducing your websites HTTP request is a really
  important factor when dealing with your websites
  speed.
• HTTP is Hypertext Transfer Protocol and it is the
  process that sends the request about your web
  page to the server which is responded back by the
  server with the file that could be your home page
  and other pages.These requests include all the
  details about your webpage images, Flash, Style
  sheets etc. therefore the more the page
  components the more it takes to load the page.
• You can improve the load time and minimize HTTP
  request by the following
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• 1. Moving JavaScript to the Bottom
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• JavaScript should be moved out of the header
  section and to the bottom of page before
  lt/bodygttag because otherwise the rendering of the
  page will be blocked until the whole page is
  loaded. Due to this reason users see a blank page
  for first few seconds.
• 2. Keep CSS in The Header Section
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• If CSS is moved at the bottom it will restrain
  the browser to work properly, allowing the text
  to jump before the whole page is loaded. Also,the
  display and format will be disturbed, clearly
  this will not add to the user experience.

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• 3. Image Optimization
• Images are found to be one of the many factors
  that impacts your website speed therefore it is
  recommended to keep images lower than 100kb
  because high resolution images do not load
  quickly and takes more time to be processed.
• Image Format
• JPEG is seen as the best format for images
  because it is compressed and works best with
  images that contain many color pellets. They work
  best with large images such as photo grams and
  much more.
• PNG has a transparency percentage and should be
  used for small images such as images in menu,
  category etc.
• GIFs are best when dealing with animated images
  but make sure it is used when dealing with very
  small images like icons, flags etc.
• Image Size
• Image size is important factor too, so try to
  resize images according to your website width, it
  is recommended to resize your images below 2000px
  to increase load time but also consider the
  quality when doing so. A 5000px image, if
  downsized below 2000px will result in poor
  quality

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• 4. JavaScript and CSS Files Minfication
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• Why do you minify? Well when you go through this
  process, any unnecessary characters from source
  code are removed without impacting its
  functionality which consequently reduces the page
  load time even if it is a browser or any kind of
  digital device.
• Some good online minification tools are
• Minify (for both JS and CSS files)
• GitHub
• Minifier
•  You can search for more Minification tools
  online.
• 5. Concentrate JS and CSS Files
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• Keeping all the JS and CSS files concentrated
  helps your website to take up less bandwidth and
  less files means less requests therefore it
  renders the page quickly along with providing
  improved user experience.
• 6. Using CDN
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• Content Delivery Network(s) is one of the best
  ways to reduce HTTP request and improve website
  speed. CDNs are a network that have optimized
  servers across the world, such as Amazon
  Cloudfront and it helps in rendering the
  websites content faster such as JavaScript, CSS
  and Images.
• It allows to send HTTP request of relatively
  large files one by one and not in one go that
  improves the load speed. Furthermore, the data
  requested is responded from the server that is
  closest to the user, therefore, the shorter the
  distance the faster is the load time.

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• 7. Gzip Compression
• Gzip is a process that enables the file size to
  be reduced and it does this by compressing the
  files like JavaScript, PHP, HTML, and CSS from
  its original size by 30 which makes the web page
  load quite faster than before.
• These compressed files are sent to the users
  browser and will be automatically decompressed in
  order to get it back to its original size so that
  it is loaded for viewers.
• You can enable gzip compression for Apache using
  .htaccess file by using the following mods
• mod_deflate
• mod_gzip
• Although it doesnt matter which mod you use but
  because mod_deflate supported by many servers and
  it is configured and documented better.
• Use one of the given codes below to enable
  mod_deflate

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• Use one of the codes given below to enable
  mod_gzip if mod_deflate doesnt work
• NOTEPut one of these codes in the .htaccess file
  that can be found in the websites root folder.
• 8. Browser Caching is Enabled
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• It is highly recommended to enable the browser
  caching because when a user will visit your site
  the components of the page such as JavaScript,
  images, HTML, style sheets etc. will be saved to
  the users caches hard drive. Now whenever that
  user visits your webpage again, another HTTP
  request will not be sent, this will definitely
  speed up the load time.

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• 9. Minimizing the Redirects
• Your website loads slower when redirects are used
  in the code, it is unnecessary to some extent
  because users will be sent to one place just so
  that they can be redirected to another.
• Redirects will hurt the users especially the
  mobile users and are a waste of time that
  actually makes your web page to load slowly.
• Using HTTP redirects will allow the mobile users
  to be sent directly to the mobile specific URLs.
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  s-for-improving-your-website-speed/