Submitted by admin on Thu, 11/21/2019 - 14:47
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Speed up Your Site

Speed Up Your Website:

Speed plays a vital role in determining the overall impact of your website. In fact, the great part of the user experience is determined by the overall speed of your site.

During present times when people prefer to use mobile devices to access the net, it has become even more important to have a website that can load quickly across multiple devices without any hassles. So you would certainly not like to lag behind your competitors just because their site loads faster than yours. That’s why we bring you a number of ways to speed up your website and make it a hit among the visitors. Here are a few things to keep in mind to speed up your website.

 

Don't Populate Your Site With Too Many Elements

A number of HTTP requests are initiated as soon as someone opens your site. Why? To download various parts of your website right from stylesheet to scripts and media files. Remember, a separate HTTP request is needed for downloading every single part. Cracking the equation you will find that the more elements your site has, the more HTTP requests would be needed that eventually slows down your site!

  • Make your site leaner so that it can load swiftly. Cut down bulky elements like media files, too many high-resolution images and heavy style sheets. Make your scripts neat and clean cutting down the volume of codes as much as possible.

  • One of the major concerns would be how can you reduce the number of elements without changing the impact of the site.

  • The best way to reduce the volume of elements while keeping your site’s appearance intact would be to minify the files. Besides, you can also combine them in order to reduce the size and the number of the file that your site uses.

  • Templates facilitate the process of building the site but they are also one of the major culprits for slowing down your site by making the code bulky and adding unnecessary mess to the same.

 

Minify & Combine the Files

By minifying the files we don’t mean to delete any important elements but to remove the unnecessary things that don’t add any value like white space, messy code and formatting.

  • Linebreaks, indentations extra spaces and other unnecessary formatting don’t add an iota of value to your site but they do occupy significant space, making your site slow. Check for all these factors and eliminate them instantly.

  • Having multiple style sheets or JavaScript files obviously multiplies the loading time. Combining them will help you make your site leaner and quicker to load.

  • Unnecessary plug-ins can also make your site lazy to load. Some of the plug-ins are outright useless but you still have them on your site while the others were used for a certain period only but you don’t require them anymore. Check for such unnecessary plug-ins and eliminate them then and there.

 

Optimise the Way Files Load

Apart from minifying and combining the file, you may also want to optimise the loading of the file on your pages.

 

Two Types of Loading

When a single element is loaded at a time it is called Synchronous loading. There is another way of loading that allows multiple elements to be loaded simultaneously at a time, called Asynchronous loading.

 

Understandably the queue up system of Synchronous loading delays your site and makes it slower. On the other hand, the Asynchronous loading allows a “bunch” of the file to load at the same time that makes your site load faster. Any Asynchronous CSS or JavaScript file is not loaded until the file in progress is completely loaded. In such case, the browser keeps on loading the other elements on the page at the same time.

 

Go to WP rocket plug-in and look next to Blocking CSS.JS. Click to place a tick at the options (in checkbox format) next to it.

Now click save changes.

  • It is also possible to queue up the heavy files that are known as deferring. Deferring allows the lightweight files to load quickly before starting the loading process of heavy files that take significant time to be loaded.

  • People having Wordpress site can use the WP Rocket plug-in to facilitate the deferring of heavy files like JavaScript. This plug-in compresses the process and saves you from unnecessary complexity. All you have to do is to go to the plug-in and click on the box adjacent to JS file deferred. Nothing else is needed!

  • The people with HTML site can add the code for calling an external JavaScript file before the </body tag >.

 

Reduce the Gap Between Request and Loading Process

While the above tips can help you speed up the loading process you can also invest some efforts to reduce the gap between request and loading process. TTFB is the waiting time for the browser before the first byte of the data arrives (reaches the browser) from the server. According to Google, the ideal TTFB should not exceed 200 ms.

 

When your site is opened by the visitor an HTTP request is sent by their browser to the hosting server. After the request is sent the following series of steps occurs.

DNS Lookup

Serve to process

Response

 

The chrome’s developer tools allow you to see the length of this process for your specific site. Alternatively, you can use a third-party tool as well. Keep in mind that the speed of your personal connection affects the response time if you are using Google Chrome developer tools. If your connection is slow then it will show the slow response time corresponding to the speed of your server.

 

Click on the tab Network and go to waterfall column and hover the mouse over the top item.

Webpage test and other tools also allow you to test the site from the data center.

Most of the time the network's problems, web server configuration, high amount of traffic or dynamic content creation are the reasons that add to the TTFB.

You cannot control all of these issues. However, the server configuration and dramatic content creation are two things that you can have control on.

Your dynamic page needs to be built by the server before it can be able to respond. It is not the case with the static pages.

You can enable caching and quicken the TTFB.

Just go to the general settings and look for page cache. You will see an option enable to check the box and you are done.

The VPS or dedicated server also allows you to speed up the dynamic elements by enabling object caching.

 

Note: However, due to the limitations and difference in the shared hosting plans, it is best not to enable object caching as it consumes more resources and can eventually slow down your site as you get only the limited amount of resources that are shared among by users.