Website load time is too much? How to improve the load time of my website?

From last 2-3 years the we have seen lots of changes in Google’s algorithm and now one thing is clear that old tricks like spammy links , spammy content with your targeted keywords is not going to work in any case.

Underlying philosophy of Google is to provide appropriate and relevant information to the customer and make sure that the user experience in excellent on your website if they are coming to a website through google search engine. So to keeping in line with that and to improve your website’s user experience one of the most important factor is load time of the website. This is the time which a website takes to load the complete page on your browser. To rank better in search engine you must always ensure that your website load in minimum possible time. High load time websites are pushed down in ranking and google highlights high load time website as well as shown in image below.

So in this article we are going to share few important tips that will make your site load fast and improve the user experience and ranking as well.

1 – Minify CSS / JS / Html file: This is the first note in order to decrease the load time. Minify means minimization of file. In this we need to remove all unnecessary characters from code but make sure that it’s not going to change the functionality of website. Also remove all white spaces, comments and new line spacing.
The example of minified CSS is mentioned below:

So if you will minify your code then it will surely improve the load time. There are some online tools are also available to minify the file but doing changes manually is recommended because it will not cause any problem.

2 – Compress images: This will be next step towards site enhancements. If you will analyze the website in Google page speed test then you may see the recommendations to “Optimize images”.

Compressing images means to decrease the file size and make image size “Light weight”. This can be done through various methods which are:
A) Online tools like “Tinypng”, in this you can simply add the images and it will compress automatically.
B) Few desktop tools are also available “Trimage”, and few paid tools are also available like “Jpegmini”, “Kraken” etc.
C) The option is Adobe Photoshop. In this you let the designer take their call because they can use the Photoshop better and they can compress the images in few steps.

3 – Sprite sheet for images: Sprite sheet is a combination of several small graphics in one file. For example you are using 10 small icons in your website then your designer can help you in this and they can combine various icons in one. See example below:

(6 separate files):

All 6 images in one file:

Reason why? Basically if you will use 6 different files then it will hit on server for 6 times. But if we combine these images in 1 then it will hit the server once. So if you have various types of icons in your website then you can choose this option and site performance will get improved.

4 – Caching: Caching is helpful and important point in websites. When a website loads it can make a copy of some related files in the your website or server depending on what type of caching is running and this helps in loading website fast next time. Caching can be done on two places one is server side and other is file caching. In server caching you can ask your server guy to install server side caching program like “Memcache”, “Varnish” and “Ehcache”. And second is on your platform where you have developed your website. There are lots of options available if you are dealing with CMS. Few are mentioned below:
A) Drupal, in this if you will explore the option under “Performance” then you can see few cache options like “Caching for blocks”, “Caching of files” and “Caching for users”. So you can simply use the options according to use.
B) WordPress, There are few plugins are available like “W3 Total cache” and “WP Fastest Cache” and you can select any of them for your website.
C) Joomla, some extensions are available for Joomla also and one of them is “Jotcache”.

You can also set caching for your online store as well for example:
A) Magento, In this few paid tools are available like “Full Page Cache : automatic block caching & performance optimization” and “Cache ― Full Page Cache”.
B) Xcart, few cache options are available in Xcart admin panel. If you will go through “Look & feel > Performance” then you will get few options like “Aggregate CSS files” , “Aggregate JS files” etc from which you can customize your cache.

5 – Enable Gzip: This is the option that you can configure on server side. Gzip will provide you fast transfer of files over network. And its compression will flow smaller files which loads faster for the users of your website. In this you can take help of your server guy.

6 – Combine various CSS and JS files in one: This is the technique and necessary steps from which your site can perform better. This can be a problem if you will use various CSS and JS files for your website because various files will increase the overall hits on server. If you will analyze your URL through Google speed test then you will see recommendations for that.

In above mentioned screenshot you can see that Google pointing towards the different files and for this basically you need to check each file and try to combine them in one so that hits on server can be less and respectively the website will loads fast.
So there were some methods to improve your website speed. Hope this will help you improve your website. Thanks for reading and check back for more new blogs related to website and related areas.