As you may have heard that Google has implemented a new criterion to determine your rankings on search results, the website speed. Increasing your website loading speed is not only important for getting a high search ranking and it will also affect your visitors’ perception about your website. Visitors will leave it immediately if any webpage taking longer than 8 seconds to load. When you are developing your websites, there are many ways you can speed up your page load time. Following are a few tips that I highly recommended you to follow so as to bring your website visitor a better experience.
1.Make sure that you have provided the visual elements to be downloaded at the first time. Many inexperienced website developer may put the JavaScript at the top of the documents, thus it prevent visitors from seeing the visual content till finishing the download of JavaScript.
2.Make sure that your site doesn’t have any unwanted tags or broken links. You may not know that errors on your web sites can also slow down your website. If you are sure that your website is error free, it will enhance your website loading speed without any doubt.
3.Reduce the use of external files such as JavaScript documents and style sheets. As they will increase the load time of your web page. Even though it might a bit harder for a developer to read the code, it is still advised to include them in the html file since this will decrease the load time of your website rapidly.
4.It is worth considering optimizing your image files. As we all known, images are an essential part for any website. However, there are several different images formats with different sizes. If you are sure that the smallest size of file will not do harm to the quality of the image file, it is advised to use the smallest one. Generally speaking, PNGs can provide graphics with transparent backgrounds but have a larger file size than jpeg. Bitmaps image file also take up a large quantity of memory. To ensure the speedy webpage loading time, you had better avoid using them. In addition, animated gifs and flash files will increase page load time and should be used carefully.
5.Basically, the majority fast loading websites have fairly simple website design. Too much complicated website design will slow down your website speed without any doubt. And website developers who are not able to make a balance between details and their presentation on the screen usually come up with a website where design overkills usability and speed. However, some designers are able to make the right balance and create usable, elegant and clean web-sites with simple layouts.
6.For better loading time, it is a good practice to use the Server Side Include (SSI) files. Server Side Includes files are files that have some commonly used code that can be reused by many pages in your site. There are a couple of advantages for using SSI files. For one thing, it is easy to maintain your website. For another, as I mentioned in this article, it will reduce the loading time of your web pages. Once they are called from the web server, SSI files will be resided in the cache so that it will be loaded much faster on subsequent requests.