13 Point Site Speed Checklist.

Use 13-Point Checklist to Make Your Site Load Faster

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Have you ever experienced the frustrating wait time of a website? The site likely needed to be built with speed in mind. One of the most important components in providing a satisfying experience for website visitors is the site’s load time. The longer it takes for your site to load, the more likely visitors will feel annoyed and leave. Customers could stop coming back if that happens often enough. That’s why it’s important to think about loading times while making a website. Here’s a 13-Point site speed checklist to use as a jumping-off point for making your site faster. When you keep these guidelines in mind, you can guarantee that each and every one of your site’s users have a positive experience.

1. Compress Images

When it comes to the time it takes a page to load, images are typically the biggest culprit. Some picture optimization techniques can help your site load more quickly:

2. Reduce Image Size

Compressing images is one method for minimizing their storage needs. You may use free internet programs like TinyPNG and JPEGmini to reduce the file size of your photographs without sacrificing image quality.

3. Utilize SVG Images

Another picture that may be used for logos, icons, and drawings is scalable vector graphics (SVGs). They can help your page load faster because they are often substantially less in file size than other image kinds like JPEGs or PNGs.

Improving the Alt Text and File Names of Images

You may improve your search engine rankings by optimizing the file names and alt text of your photos and their compression. Having your photographs indexed in this way will boost your site’s discoverability.

Improve CSS Transmission Performance

With a tool like PageSpeed Insights (PSI), you may calculate the potential cost savings of various optimization options for CSS delivery optimization. PSI will provide a list of suggestions, including deleting unneeded CSS, utilizing media queries to load just the CSS required for the current viewport size, and inlining tiny vital CSS snippets. PSI will also generate a list of recommendations.

 

In addition to manually figuring out the critical route CSS for your site, you can utilize a service like Critical Path CSS Generator to do the heavy lifting. The above-the-fold content of an HTML document should include this crucial path CSS so that it may be displayed by the browser as soon as feasible.

4. Prioritize Content Above-the-Fold

One of the most important aspects of a site is how quickly it loads. A delay of only one second in page load time has been proven to reduce conversions by as much as 7 percent. Above-the-fold information is what a reader can see without having to scroll down the page. This is the most crucial section of the page and should load before anything else.

5. Use the Memory Saved by the Browser

You may take advantage of browser caching to make your site load faster. If you activate caching in your site’s settings, your visitors’ browsers will store copies of some of your site’s files on their local machines. This implies that the user’s browser can load the site’s files from local storage rather than having to download them again on each subsequent visit.

6. Integrate a CDN (Content Distribution Network)

A content distribution network (CDN) is a group of servers that works together to provide data to consumers in different parts of the world. By speeding up content delivery and decreasing server load, CDNs may boost your website’s performance.

CDN services are many, but some of the most well-known include Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, and Akamai. Setting up a content delivery network (CDN) for your website requires signing up with a provider and configuring your website to use the CDN.

7. Improving JavaScript Transmission

While JavaScript is necessary for many functionalities on today’s websites, it can also cause your site to run more slowly. Optimizing JavaScript delivery is essential to ensure the quickest possible page load times.

Delivery of JavaScript may be improved in a number of distinct ways:

  • When using the async or defer attributes on script tags, you may tell the browser to continue loading resources while JavaScript is processing the code. Your page’s loading time may be decreased as a result of this.
  • Minimizing JavaScript files entails eradicating everything that isn’t strictly essential for their operation, including whitespace, comments, and unused code. You may further minimize the size of your files by compressing your code, which can help speed up load times.

8. CDN-loaded JavaScript

The term “content delivery network” (CDN) refers to a group of servers that work together to provide data to users in a timely fashion regardless of where they happen to be located. If you’re having trouble with performance, consider using a content delivery network to serve your JavaScript files.

9. Avoid Redirects

Websites often lose performance due to redirects. A user’s browser will make a request to your server for the requested page whenever they attempt to access your site. A redirect forces the user’s browser to make three requests: to the original page, to the redirect server, and then to the destination page. This might be a significant time drain if your site uses several redirects.

To prevent this, redirects should only be used when required. Instead of directing them to a landing page, send them straight to the content they need. Try to avoid redirects whenever possible and instead utilize a more direct route to the desired destination.

10. Switch on Gzip Compression

One of the easiest and most efficient ways to speed up your website’s loading time is to use Gzip compression. Web pages and CSS files are compressed using Gzip before being sent to the client. This lessens the required data transmission, which in turn speeds up your website loads.

Then, save the modified .htaccess file and send it to your server. All done! After this, your site will be able to utilize Gzip compression.

11. Reduce the Use of Materials

One of the easiest and most efficient ways to improve your site’s performance is to minimize its resources. Deleting extraneous characters and whitespace from your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files will do this. When you do this, your web pages will load faster.

12. Reduce HTTP requests

When a user navigates to a website, their browser sends several HTTP requests to the server to get the various components (CSS files, JavaScript files, images, etc.). Combining and compressing data to decrease the number of HTTP requests helps to speed up server response time.

13. Image Size Information Required

Your photos should load quickly, so check their dimensions. The HTML code must include the image’s dimensions.

It’s easy to make this sound like an impossible undertaking when, in reality, it’s not. The pictures may be resized with the help of an internet application like Picresize. Once you have the desired measurements, add the width and height properties to the img tag in your HTML code.