Even if I was completely wrong about everything else, one thing is for certain – you’ve experienced at least one painfully slow website in your life. That is a situation you may be familiar with, so I will share with you some tips I’ve collected over the years that will help you speed up your website. Consider the times when you’ve also closed off a browser window while waiting for a site to load if you don’t think website speed matters to you. In reality, 53% of users abandon a website that does not load in 3 seconds. Search engine rankings are influenced in part by the performance of your website. Taking advantage of Denver web design can help you improve your ranking.
HTTP Requests Should Be Reduced
In addition to images and stylesheets, the web browser makes HTTP requests to download scripts, stylesheets, and images from the webserver. In addition to the overhead of establishing the connection between the browser and the remote server, HTTP/1.1 protocols have some overhead as well.
Further, the number of parallel network requests is generally limited by browsers, so if you queue up a lot of requests, some of them may be blocked if the queue is too long. Denver web design can help you identify and monitor HTTP requests and resources that load slowly for your real users.
KISS (keep it simple, stupid)
That is not a topic taught by many web experts, but it has helped me in so many ways. The acronym for this is KISS. The term was coined in the 1960s by a smart chap who emphasized the value of simple systems.
In my experience, this can be applied to almost anything in life, including website creation. A fast site is easier to manage and maintain if you avoid overly complex implementations and designs.
Design & Visualization
Simple design and visuals reduce overhead mainly through reducing design and visual complexity. An image-heavy site with stunning videos and pictures might load as slowly as a sloth on a bad day. Divide the image and video loading across multiple pages to keep it neat.
Plugins & Code
It is a wonder that WordPress is highly modular yet so easy to use. You can find a plugin for almost anything you want to do. It may sound thrilling, but don’t overload your site with plugins. There are different people behind each plugin (and probably different companies). Rather than streamline your site performance, they aim to accomplish a specific objective. When possible, don’t use plugins for things you can manage yourself. Imagine, for instance, a plugin that will allow you to insert tables into your text. Instead of having to use a plugin to draw tables, you can easily learn some basic HTML code, right?
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Serving static files can be a challenge. It makes sense to outsource this part of your infrastructure to someone else since this isn’t the main business for 99% of websites. Content Delivery Networks or CDNs are specifically designed for this purpose. CDNs will optimize the delivery of static files such as CSS, images, fonts, and JavaScript to your visitors. Setting them up is usually very simple.
A CDN uses servers that are geographically dispersed. The files will be served from the closest server to the visitor. The load time of static files served from your servers tends to increase when users are geographically distant. You can monitor the performance of files hosted on CDNs with Denver web design, so you can determine if it makes sense to outsource this part of your infrastructure. Initially, we used Sematext Experience to measure whether or not we were serving assets faster to our users when we started using a CDN for Sematext Cloud.