Speed, technology’s ultimate goal! Get to know how to speed up your website to boost your traffic and business as well.

• The speed of your site will greatly influence your success. This texts is to help you understand the various procedures you can apply to increase your website’s speed and enjoy success.
• The speed of your website does matter a lot. Come to think of it, even a 1-sec delay in load time leads to fewer page views, a decrease in customer satisfaction and a great loss in conversions. This was confirmed by Amazon and Walmart who increased their revenue and conversions respectively by increasing their sites.
• Have you ever asked yourself why speed matters this much? Well, a study was done by found out that:
• 46% of web users always expect a web site to a load time of 2-secs or less.
• 39% of them will exit a web page that has a load time of 3-secs or more, never to come back.
• Over 50% of web shoppers stated that web pages with fast load times are the reasons for their loyalty to these websites.

So, the speed of your website is a thing of great concern not only as a matter of Google ranking but also as a matter of increasing profits and maintaining high traffic. Today, we are going to share with you some of the things you can do to speed up your website.

How to speed up your website.

Here we are going to categorize the mechanisms of speeding up your site into three:

Server

Your server choice directly influences the speed of your website. Choosing a professional web host like  Yocta, who have the perfect server configuration will be of great assistance when it comes to speeding your website. You should check out our article on, it will help you in choosing the web host that serves your goals.

Super Fast Web Hosting

Enable gzip compression 

Effects of gzip compression

A study by Yahoo states that gzip compression reduces the response size by around 70% and that about 90% of the current web traffic flow through web browsers that support gzip.

Basically, gzipping reduces HTTP response size and intern reduces the response time. It is also a very easy method of reducing the weight of your page. You can add this cod to your .htaccess file to enable Gzip.

# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

# Or, compress certain file types by extension:

<files *.html>

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

</files>

Or add this PHP code on top of your PHP file.

<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER[‘HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING’], ‘gzip’)) ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”); else ob_start(); ?>

You can alsp use CMS plugins i.e. WP HTTP Compression plugin in WordPress.

Use CDN

Literally, CDN or content delivery network is a group of servers located in multiple places with the purpose of delivering contents more effectively to their users. With CDN hosting a server with the fastest response time is prioritized. Making them faster than the traditional web hosting.

The redirects of your landing page should be cacheable.

Mostly. Mobile web pages ten to direct users to different URLS therefore, having made your redirect cacheable will help speed up your page’s load time. Using a 302 redirect that has a cache lifespan of about one day will enable web users on mobile devices to redirect.

Make good use of keep alive

• According to Wikipedia, Keep-alive signals always pass at predefined intervals and a very important on the web. When a signal is passed, in cases there is no reply, the link that it is sent to is assumed to be down, so in future data will be routed through a different path until the links go live again.
• It a known fact that HTTP keep-alive enables TCP connections to stay up and also assists in reducing the latency in upcoming requests. Since most web hosts disable this feature as it is an optional feature, you need to confirm with them and ask them more about it.

Make good use of browser caching.

The expires headers outlines if a website’s resource should be requested directly from the server of from a Brower’s cache. Setting expires headers for resources enables browsers to store the resources in their caches. In so doing the next time a web user visits the page again, it will have a faster load time as the resources will be readily available on the browser.

Content Elements

Sometimes you may not have complete access to your web server therefore you can manipulate the content elements to meet your needs. Here are some of the ways to do this.

Minify your source code

You should remove empty elements, whitespaces, CDATA sections and HTML comments for you to reduce your website size, decrease network latency and fasten your sit’s load time.  But this is easier when you use some only tools like WordPress’ Autoptimize which are able to optimize and compress your source code. The best part is that the support CDN.

Specify character sets

To speed up browser rendering you need to specify character sets within your website’s HTTP headers. This can be done using this code.

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>

Reduce redirects

Redirects alas lead to more HTTP requests and more latency. You need to make sure you only have redirects that are not only necessary but have no solution to solve it. You can read what google recommends.

Minimize DNS lookups

• It is proved that DNS lookups always take a lot of time to look for the IP address of a hostname. And the browser will be at a standstill until the lookup process is completed.
• Response time is greatly increased when you reduce the number of unknown hostnames.

JS, CSS and images

Outline the dimensions of the images on your site and optimize them

• When rendering a web page, browsers load images after the page is fully loaded.  Giving dimensions to your images enable the browser to load them effectively.
• Hence preventing browser reflow after images are loaded. Specify the height and width attribute in the <img> tag.
• Also, images always have comments and colors of no importance. Minimizing image sizes help in loading the, especially in slow internet. Always opt for images in the .jpeg format.

Put CSS on top and JS at the bottom.

This prevents progressive rendering.  Hence enabling fast loading of pages by web browsers. Since JS will be compiled last after the page is completely loaded.

• Bottom line, these are not the only way for you to speed up your website. You should do more research on your goals then find other methods that will fully enable you to reach these goals.
• Yes, the speed of your site is not the number one consideration when launching a website but it is one of those hidden factors that will determine your success.
• Faster websites will help owners reach their goals faster. But when it comes to server speed we at Yocta have your back. Contact us today for any hosting queries or needs.