Are you running a business? Do you own a website for your business? Today’s internet is almost a world far away from old-school techniques. If you don’t own a website, then you’re losing out amazing opportunities.
Most customer will surf online for product details or review that will greatly help customers make a smart purchasing decision. As per research, over 88% of customers will perform research before purchasing a product online or offline store.
Want to run a successful business in this ultra-tech marketplace? Then you should have a ‘Website’. A professional website will act as a backbone for your business.
So you’ve successfully created a website for your business. Done a great job!
You would’ve spent several days and weeks striving over website UX and UI production. Countless hours in editing the content or redesigning.
Speed plays a major role in generating high traffic and conversion rate. Website loading time is an essential factor for search engine and impact in ranking as well.
Who requires a slow webpage? Nobody right! Even Google doesn’t encourage such kind of slow websites. Google states that – Website need to be fast.
Will you prefer a website that takes over 7 seconds to load? No way. Also, you don’t even like to revisit that website again. Making your visitors happy must be your intent, ultimately visitors acts pillars to run any successful website or blog.
One second delay during page webpage load can yield to
- 11% lesser webpage views
- Customer satisfaction decreases
- Huge loss in conversions
One extra second could make a more impact on your business success. Don’t panic! Here are a few tips on how to improve the page speed of your blog. These tips can also work for a website also.
Image optimization
Whether you’re running e-commerce, fashion, travel or beauty portals, image optimization can be an important part. Select the perfect format, size and quality for each image on your blog. JPG, GIF, PNG are the most commonly used image formats. To improve the page speed of your website optimizing image is mandatory.
Image optimization can be divided into 3 categories such as
- Lighter
- Fewer
- Faster
Reduce your HTTP request
When you add asset frequently, your blog needs to generate an extra HTTP request for user communication. This additional HTTPs can incrementally slow down your blog.
It can be pretty impossible to handle everything all alone. Therefore, there are few tools such as developer tools, GTmetrix to track your HTTP request, response and other related issues.
The number of files on the blog, the number of HTTP requests user’s web browser will require to interact. Also, a large file can take a longer time to transfer.
Reduce your blog HTTP request:
- Check out the number of HTTP requests your blog currently makes.
- Remove unless images from your blog
- Reduce and resize other images
- Combine cascading style sheets (CSS) files together
Minify and merge files
Now you would have got a brief knowledge about ‘a number of HTTP requests for your blog’. Now you need to start reducing the HTTP requests. The best possible way is to include HTML, JavaScripts, CSS or other files.
These are important files for every blog, by optimizing your blog code can improve the speed of your page.
- Removing blank spaces and code comments
- Commos and full stops
- Special characters
- Deleting unused code
Resize images
Resizing images is essential. Resize image as per your website requirements. It is an easy job, resize the image on a server then start uploading in a browser. There are many online resizer tools available in the market such as ImageKit. This software offer resizing, cropping, etc.
Make great use of content delivery networks
CDN is n/w’s of servers which are specially used to distribute the overall load of delivering a piece of content. The ultimate goal of CDN is to provide high availability and performance to end-users. There are multiple blue copies of your blog will be stored at various geographical data centres. Therefore your visitor can enjoy free and faster access to your blog.
Sometimes CDN is also called as content distribution n/w.
- It’s not mandatory to have CDN to your blog. But having CDN can help you when you’ve users around the globe.
- CDN can reduce round-trip-time.
- A content delivery network can serve your blog content faster.
Running too many advertisements
It’s a known fact displaying advertisements can generate heavy traffic to your blog. But ads shouldn’t be the reason for your user experience and performance. Also, don’t run too many ads on your website. Displaying many ads can be the major reason to slow down your blog.
Advertisements can slow down blog loading time. There are multiple rich media advertisements such as pop-up, registration, play and will, auto downloads, etc. These can build thousands of HTTP-requests, also makes your blog unresponsive.
Avoid flash content
Everyone like flash content! Because flash content is an amazing technique for making interactive. Though it is a highly recommended tool from many. But the problem is, it contributes to slow loading time. Basically, flash content has a larger file size. Therefore, your webpages will load very slow.
By reducing the file size of flash content or completely eliminating flash content can improve the loading speed of your blog.
If your planning to improve your page loading speed, then choose ‘HTML5’. This can easily replace the flash content effectively.
Stop using custom fonts
The one who is using WordPress or other software will surely have an idea about custom fonts. These fonts are used to give a unique look for your blog. With amazing features available you can easily change the fonts within single clicks. No additional coding is required to adapt custom fonts.
Though using a custom font is a great idea! There are many drawbacks such as blocking elements, FOUT problem, etc. It can effect on page loading speed. It’s good to make use of simple fonts in your content – Arial, Verdana, Georgia, etc. These fonts don’t require additional java scripting programming.
There is an old saying ‘slow & study wins the race’. When you consider your website performance, that doesn’t work. How do you feel when you’re website is having slow loading time? Feel like a mini heartache. The scariest part ever right! Follow the mentioned tips and improve the page speed for your blog effectively.