In modern search engines a website speed has a great importance to rank on top search engine result pages. It also helps you to give your users a more better experience of your website. Definitely, no one will like to stick on a poor loading website which takes tens of seconds to load a simple piece of content. So today I have decided to talk about making websites more quick and speedy.
Note: There are always numerous ways to accomplish a task. However, we will just talk about my personal experiences. One may differ from any statement but practicing is the final way to get to a conclusion.
Loading stylesheets
A big reason of poor loading for websites that are lacking to compete in the modern and fast web world is that they believe in loading stylesheets from other sources. This is not a good practice indeed, all you stylesheets should be saved on your personal server.
Loading stylesheets such as bootstrap or any other means that you are asking the user’s browser to first reach a file which is hosted on an external resource and then get CSS styling from there and put that on your web-page.
This only takes a few seconds but actually, “few more seconds” which means that your competitor who’s website has same sort of structure like yours but has his stylesheet on his own server can easily beat you because his user’s browser does not need to go through any external page.
It is recommended to download stylesheets on your own server. For Example, if you are using bootstrap then download the source file on your server and link it to all of your pages.
Loading Scripts
Same thing is with loading scripts from faraway websites, servers or resources. Basically, it will also ask the browser to first get to the page which is linked and then get Javascript or jQuery code from there.
It’s again not a good practice because it will take few more seconds to load the page. A good practice is to put Javascript in the most bottom of your page(just above </body> tag).
Also when you are getting a script from an external resource, then using such a practice will help you out because the browser will first load the HTML and later it will bother about the Javascript since it’s located at the bottom of the page. But still it’s recommended to host the script on your own server. For example, jQuery is the most popular Javascript library. And most of people use github or other resource to load jQuery on their websites which is really not a good idea.
So whether it is a library or a normal script or a jQuery plugin, make sure that you are hosting it on your own server instead of getting it from an external server.
Using small images
Images have their own importance for any website but sometimes images can slow down our website or blog’s page speed. Go to Google Page Speed Tool and test your page, if your page has any large images then Google will recommend to compress it somehow.
The only reason for that is when you put large size images on your website, then you actually put more pressure on your user’s browser because now it also has to download the long image on the user screen.
So be very sensitive when putting images on your Blog or website. Make sure that your image is not big enough to slow your website’s page speed. And it’s better to not use images from external resources, because then your user’s browser will also have to load an image from another website. It will be much more better if you will upload all of your website’s images on your own disk and then put them on your pages.
AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
AJAX is basically an art of exchanging data with a server and updating page with new content without loading the whole page. A good example of this is Facebook notification bar.
You can login to your Facebook account, click on notification button and all notifications will be loaded and will be updated frequently(if there is an update) without loading the whole page.
This helps you to increase your website’s efficiency and speed. For example, you have a website which has three pages (Home, Portfolio and Contact Us). All the pages have same interface and styling(header,menu,sidebar and footer) but the content area is different, so there is an opportunity for a webmaster to use AJAX.
He may only load the content area from the server but not the header,menu,sidebar and footer area. This will help you to enhance your page speed because basically you are not loading the whole page but updating few areas of the website.
Better Hosting Services
The most important thing for a website’s page speed is the response time of the server. Whether you are using shared hosting, VPS or you have your own server, Make sure that your server is quick enough to respond.
The best way to test your server speed is to visit “Google page speed test” page who’s link is shared above. Normally, an average hosting server should respond in less than a second. But this is not enough, it’s good to purchase a high-quality hosting service which can respond within 0.30 seconds if you have a dynamic website which has tons of traffic.
Here are my recommended hosting companies:
Conclusion
In the end, I will like you guys to share your ideas and innovations in the comment area. As I said in the beginning that you may differ from some of the points raised in this article. But practicing and testing will eventually lead you to a more correct conclusion. However, no one can neglect the importance of a website’s page speed for better search engine ranking. Another good way to improve your website’s page speed is to put all of your scripts(whether you are linking a script or you are creating a script on the same page) in the bottom of your webpage(just above </body> tag) so that your user’s browser will first load all the HTML and CSS and after it Javascript will be loaded.
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