Website is one of the most important digital platforms for businesses to promote their product and services. If your website takes more time to load, you can lose most of your potential customers even before they see your product or services. Saving visitors time is a guarantee of trust and long-term cooperation. A user who waits too long to access a page about a product or service will go to a competitor where everything is much quicker. So your business performance is directly affected by the loading time of a website. Today we will talk about what factors affect the page loading time and how to optimize them.
1. Many HTTP requests
HTTP requests are created whenever a browser needs to retrieve a page, file, or image from a website server. The Network tab in Developer tools allows you to monitor the number of network requests made by your applications. The browser limits the number of simultaneous requests to between 4-8. So you cannot also make large numbers of requests at once.
How to reduce number of HTTP requests
A. Combine your CSS / JS files.
B. Lazy loading.
C. Turn on browser caching.
By Demir Selmanovic, Full-stack Developer
2. No CDN present
If you don’t have a CDN for your website and the user is located far from the server, load time will increase. These latencies get visible because it affects all the HTTP requests made to the server.
A CDN can speed up page loading time. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network that connects computers to deliver web content quickly to many users. It does this by duplicating or caching the content on multiple servers and then directing it to nearby users.
CDN allows users to access webpage resources from servers near them. CDN servers are distributed across multiple geographical locations. This is a great way for your application to load faster, even though it can be costly.
By Adam Henson, Web Developer
3. Large files and page sizes
This is one of the biggest mistakes that can increase the loading time of websites. It should be fixed to improve the website load time. Because, It will take a long time to request a large file or large page from the web server. The load time increases if a page is made up of many large files. Enabling compression to reduce file size and page size that will speed up page loading.
By Irina Weber, Content strategist
4. Loading all resources simultaneous
Your page's loading time will increase if all HTML, CSS, and JS files are loaded at the same time because rendering will be blocked until all resources are loaded. Loading JS files after other elements can speed up the page load.
Defer JavaScript loading allows you to load large JS files only after all other elements are ready. This method ensures that your content is loaded correctly and doesn't get impacted by a large JS file. The system tells the site to load the entire document first, then load the external defer.js file.
To get the best result, you first need to prioritize content on the web page. Decide the topmost content of the web page like navigation, header, menu, and image.
It is good to move all slow and complicated JavaScript code to the bottom so that all the content at the top loads immediately. Some JavaScript code may be required to load earlier, but most can be deferred to speed up your website's loading.
By Urjashee Shaw, Web developer at Simpalm
5. Long redirection chain
We use redirects most of the time to handle deleted or moved pages to avoid broken links. But one should avoid having multiple redirections on your webpages. Long redirection chains can cause too many problems, especially for the homepage, the first page the user sees. More redirects mean more HTTP requests that will increase page load time. Google recommends that site owners remove redirects to increase load time, particularly on mobile-first websites.
By Thomas Park, Founder of Codepip
Conclusion:
Who doesn't like websites that load fast? I hope this article has convinced you about the importance of page speeds. Many small mistakes will add up in time, causing the website to load slowly. It's easy to let your site get slow due to common errors in web design. However, avoiding these mistakes can ensure faster loading. To test the performance of your website, You can use many different tools like Google Page Speed Insights, Pingdom, GTmetrix, and more. These tools can help you discover the areas where you need to improve. After you've identified the important areas that are causing the most damage, you have to take the necessary steps to increase the speed of loading for your website pages, resulting in an improved user experience.
