How to Make Your Website Faster: A Step-by-Step Guide

Website speed and performance are part of the necessary qualities of today’s websites that define the success of an online project. A well-cached website is not only helpful to the end users of the site but also is an important factor in the ranking of sites on the search engines. In a blog which may contain an ecommerce site, or a blog it is very important in optimizing the site in terms of speed. In this blog I will guide you with a lot of practical practices pertaining to these goals in order to make your site successful and glitch free. For more professional services contact a web development company Toronto to help make the right decisions.

Optimize Your Images

Images tend to be the biggest file on any website, so using big pictures slows down the loading of the website. Here’s how to optimize them:

Use the Right Format: Opt for the correct format of your images. For instance JPEG is appropriate when used in image files such as photographs and PNG is for image files with backgrounds that have been removed.
Compress Images: There are tools out there that can help you reduce image size for instance: TinyPNG or ImageOptim.
Lazy Loading: There should also be use of lazy loading technique so that whenever a user scrolls to the images they will be loaded not at once.

Leverage Browser Caching

Browser caching lets you save the images CSS and JavaScript files among other static files in the user’s device. The good thing is that as most of these visitors type in your URL and access your site again, he or she gets to pull these files from his or her cache as opposed to downloading all the files again and again which takes time.

Set Expiration Dates: When you create a file, utilise the HTTP headers so that their copies have specific dates of expiration through the browsers, so that they can request for the new copies from the server.
Minimize Server Requests: Minimise the number of trips taken by the client on the server by grouping the files (e. g. CSS, JavaScript) and utilising inline images.

Optimizing for the CSS, JS and the HTML file

Minification refers to the act of stripping your CSS, JavaScript and HTML files from all the characters which are not necessary, inclusive of the space, comments and line breaks. This decreases the size of the file and thus improves the time which is taken to load a particular file.

Use Minification Tools: Minifying of the code can be easily done with the help of tools such as UglifyJS for JavaScript, CSSNano for CSS and HTMLMinifier for HTML.
Avoid Inline CSS and JavaScript: Inline CSS and JavaScript tags are better avoided and if to be used, must be kept to the minimum possible length as they add to the page size and hence slow the page down.

Provide Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

A CDN is a system of servers present at different locations in the world. The reason for using a CDN is that your website files get cached and stored at several locations, the nearest to the user.

Choose the Right CDN: Some of the well-known CDN service providers are Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Akamai, etc. Select one which caters to your needs and your pocket allows.
Cache Static Content: Purging images, videos and CSS files and other such static content should be done on the CDN to reap the fastest results.

Enable Gzip Compression

This option compresses the web files that you have on your site before they are downloaded to the user’s browser. It can greatly decrease the amount of data that is used, as a result boosting up the load speed.

Enable Gzip on Your Server: Both, Apache and Nginx, for instance, are capable of working with Gzip compression for most web servers. It is often switched on through specific configuration files of the server.
Test Gzip Compression: Gzip should be enabled and working correctly, to check this use tools such as Gtmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insight on your website.

Speed Up Your Server Response Time

The amount of time your server takes to process response requests affects your website. There are many factors that could affect the response time of the server such as the quality of the host provider you are using and the type of configurations on the server.

Choose Quality Hosting: Choose a hosting company with a fast processor response from the server. If you are not computer literate go for the managed hosting services.
Reduce Bloat: It is always advisable to have a lean database and therefore you should ensure that you keep off all those extras that may not be very useful. Avoid the use of a CMS that adds loads of features and components to your website that you will most likely never use.

Reduce HTTP Requests

Images, stylesheets and scripts are objects that exist independently of each other and all of them need an HTTP request. Just as seen, the more requests a site pulls, the slower it takes to load. Cutting down these requests helps in enhancing the operation of the site enormously.

Combine Files: Minimise on the number of HTTP requests by uniting several CSS and JavaScript files.
Use CSS Sprites: CSS sprites overlay different pictures into one large picture and hence less picture requests are made by the site.

Conclusion
The effective and fast loading of the website is important to the usability of the site and in increasing the ranking of the site. If you adopt all the mentioned measures, your website will be as responsive as possible, and clients will be content. For professional assistance in getting your website more efficient, a web development company in Toronto shall be more than willing to assist you. It does not matter if you are trying to optimize image or working with CDNs or trying to decrease HTTP requests; they all make you closer to a faster website.