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Today users don’t have patience with poor load speeds or insufficient performance on websites. In a recent study, approximately half of web users expect to load a site in 2 seconds or less. Some users tend to leave the website if it’s not loaded within 3 seconds. An even more alarming statistic is that 64 percent of customers disappointed with the experience & Website loading time of an online store will abandon that store and visit some other online store. It means that you not only lose your current users and reduce conversion rates, but you run the risk of losing traffic from your site from those customers who may have referred your site to others. Seconds make a huge difference these days. Users expect rapid loading of your web pages, and if they don’t, they won’t stick around.
Speed up website load time
Understanding that page load time is a vital factor, most site owners make every effort to improve the performance of their site. Literally, there are hundreds of case studies supporting the value of faster websites with real-world numbers.
Now let’s take a review at ways to optimize your website for the best performance:
Reduce HTTP requests
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) Requests are calculated when a browser receives a web server file, page, or image. Such requests tend to take up about 80 percent of the load time of a website, according to Yahoo. The browser also restricts requests to 4-8 continuous connections per domain, which means it is not a choice to load 30 + assets at once. It means that the longer it takes for the page to go and retrieve them all, the more HTTP requests have to be loaded. As a result of Tech News, the load time increases for your website.
How to reduce HTTP requests
Although it seems to restrict the design of your pages by keeping them simple, there are various strategies you can use to reduce HTTP requests to relax your server.
Merge CSS/JS files
Try to combine your CSS files into a larger file (same for JS) instead of forcing the browser to fetch several CSS or JavaScript files to load. Although this can be difficult if your stylesheets and scripts differ from page to page, managing to combine them ultimately helps in long-term load times.
Load what is required
When you find that you only have to load those images on your screen, or you only need to run a particular script on your phone, using conditional statements to load them can be a great way to speed up. That way, you are not forcing the browser to load several scripts or pictures that are not going to be useful for such devices or viewports.
Decrease the number of images that you are using
If you consider some of your pages to be relatively image-heavy, try to remove some, especially if their file sizes are huge. It may not only help to reduce HTTP requests for images but may also boost your UX by eliminating distracting images that do not suit your written content.
CSS Sprites
At the same time, those pages are loading on your site. Therefore, the browser only retrieves the one you can use numerous times on the page by correctly positioning the right picture for each region of the page view.
WordPress support agents will help you to reduce HTTPS requests and fix common WordPress errors by providing proactive 24×7 WordPress support.
Use Browser caching
Browser caching enables assets to be downloaded into a cache or temporary storage space on your website once to your hard drive. Such files are now stored locally on your device, thus increasing the speed of the website with subsequent page loads. According to the latest survey, 40-60 percent of daily visitors to your site come in with an empty cache. So when users visit, you have to make it, so they see the first-page loading rapidly enough to eventually proceed through the rest of your website (with even faster loading times).
Static assets have cached longevity of at least one week, whereas third-party objects such as widgets or advertisements only last one day. CSS, JS, pictures, and media files should have an expiry of one week, but preferably one year, as the RFC guidelines are no longer valid.
Repair broken links
A broken link burdens your bandwidth, and if they experience only one broken link, no one who browses your website will likely stay there for long. Tools like Ahrefs, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and Google Webmaster Tools can assist in finding and fixing any broken links that cause problems. When broken links are repaired, you will see an increase in traffic, and note that for longer periods, people will stay on your site. Besides, the load times on the website will increase.
Optimize Images
Images can come with all kinds of colors, styles, and other data that do not add anything. If you want to speed up the loading time of your website, then optimizing images is essential. We recommend a JPEG format. Tools like Smush.it or WP Smush.it can be used for optimizing images.
Conclusion
It is quite challenging to improve your website’s speed and load time. But following the above-mentioned tips will help you to get a fast business website which will be liked by the visitors. You can also take the help of WordPress speed optimization services to improve your website’s speed and website loading time.
