In building our website, oftentimes, we’d like to put as much content in it to make it informative. It is for promotion. It’s also to get people engaged in what your business is all about. The more detailed the better. One striking factor of a good website is having a good design together with a user-friendly interface.
As part of increasing the rank and improving the visibility of a website, webmasters do SEO (search engine optimization) to bypass unnecessary codes as this would help improve the website’s performance. However, one of the mistakes not often observed by webmasters is that there are still times that websites aren’t fully optimized in terms of how it loads a page and that is why, as a result, the pages tend to load very slow.
Here in this article, you’ll learn about tips on how to make your website load faster and smoother.
5 Tips to Help your website load Faster
- Optimize the graphics
Graphics are one of the main factors that make a website attractive. True enough. Though it will be quite a challenge to webmasters on how they would be able to display high resolution images yet still make the website load fairly fast. Size matters as they say, and this is why the manner of displaying graphics in websites should always be taken into consideration.
A key to effectively manage your web graphics is to set default height and width attributes so that they will be of a uniform size.
- Cache out
Every time you load a web page, your web browser temporarily stores its information to a place called cache. The cache will be helpful in making web pages load faster in the future. One way to utilize the cache is to design your web page in such a way that the logo or any common information that you’d want to be displayed is always visible. Create an external script that will be called by different web pages in your website. Doing this, the next time that you would load another page of the same website, it won’t take that long anymore as it will use the existing information of that web page in the cache and just proceed on loading the other information of that web page.
- Omit pop-up pages
Web pages with pop-ups tend to make the entire website load slow. Some users find it annoying when suddenly new window opens especially when it is an ad. There are some websites that will bombard you with so many pop-up windows which you don’t really need to view. You’ll just end up closing them one by one. Good thing there are pop-up blockers in most web browsers and you can just unblock those pop-up windows that need to be opened, an example is a login page.
Most users or viewers would prefer the links they click to open in a new tab (since most of the web browsers of present already have a multitasking feature that enables users to open multiple tabs and load them simultaneously.Worst is when the pop-up window links you to a web page with malicious content and even your files get harmed. It’s going to be very hassle and so it is not recommended to use pop-ups because it also causes
- Tweak the code
Set a standard way of coding. It’s like helping web pages to understand one another through a common language thus this will definitely result to a faster loading web page. It’s best to build a good coding foundation for your website so it won’t be hard to track its different functionality of the need for change/update arises.
If in case you’re maintaining a website that you didn’t built nor weren’t even involved during its planning stage and then you start noticing that it’s starting to get annoying because of the way it loads, you may consider checking on the source codes and do some performance tuning then just expect the improvement afterwards. It is important to know that codes can be compressed in such a way it is optimized for web browsers to interpret them for us humans. Some codes that can be compressed are PHP, CSS and JavaScript.
- Eliminate blank spaces
It really gets boring to view a website with only little information. To get rid of boredom while viewing, simply don’t leave web pages with large amount of blank spaces as having such contributes to a slower loading web page. Compress contents in a web page if needed so you do not need to come up with a new one but make sure you don’t overload information in it. Doing such will remove some extra bytes the browser need to interpret and load. Remember, the lesser the bytes, the faster it will take for the web page to load.
The performance of your website mostly relies on the way it’s being coded. The site map should remain organized, following the detailed structure of the website. Maintain your website with proper SEO then you’re good to go. You’ll always most likely to make it right along the way if you’ve started something correctly.
About the Author
Jessica Francisco is a cheerful 25-year-old with an odd sense of fun. The least of her broad range of hobbies include swimming, hiking and listening to the music of Michael Jackson. Jessica is also one of the editors of Luke Roxas a renowned Business Tycoon from the Philippines. He is on Google +.
Increasing page load speed can be an interesting endeavor, to say the least. For those using WordPress, consider using a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache, and implement a CDN (content delivery network) to help speed things up.
I use GTmetrix’s free performance analyzing tool to see what the page speed is, and what I can do to improve it.
I use Yahoo’s Smushit image compression tool (again, free) to compress images to increase their load time.
As this article mentioned, there are lots of things a webmaster can do to increase page speed. Have fun!
Marshall—
Thank you such much for adding more specifics to these comments. My readers and I really appreciate it.
To your continued success.
Melinda F. Emerson
Some good information here. If I had a dime for every time I’ve clicked off a site because it was taking too long to load…
George,
I know exactly what you mean about clicking off sites that take too long to load, which is why I wanted someone to write about this. I am so glad you found value in it.
Best–
Melinda
useful
Thank you 🙂
Google has a pagespeed tool that’s really helpful. It hi-lights the improvements that need to be made and makes recommendations.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights