The overall website design may be great but if the load time is slow user will keep of your site. Users expect, whenever they visit a website either for online shopping or for content browsing, they do it faster and efficiently. This leads to better user experience and keep them coming back. Website load time also plays a great role in terms of Google ranking, website which take less than three second to load all the content are always ranked higher, therefore when developing a website ensure that your website designing company give the site loading time a priority.

 

What causes website to load slowly?

There are many reasons for a slower website speed which provide a negative impact on the user. Moreover 60% of people also left the website if it takes more than 3 seconds to open.

 

Some of the reasons as to why websites load slowly include,

 

• Lack of data caching where user data is required to always be reloaded from the original source, this raise the website load time as compared to cached data which is only retrieved within a second.
• Incompatible browsers, plugins, incompatible plugins always disrupt the loading and display of content on a website leading to breaking or even termination of processes which may take long to recover making the site load slowly.
• External media and content, loading content, files or even images from external source involves a HTTP request which may take several second to respond and can have negative impact on the site load time.
• Unoptimized images, most of the images which are inform of JPG, PNG and JPEG have Meta data which identify them, which increases the size, if these images are not optimized and their size reduced they make websites load longer.
• Website host plans, some of website host plans cannot accommodate much traffic to the server; this makes the site load slowly whenever there is high traffic.

 

How to make website load faster

 

1. Image optimization

Large image files have a negative impact on the site load time, in order to solve this, images need to be compressed to, increase the efficiency of storage, reduce image size by cropping and reducing the resolution without much effect on the quality, this can be done using several tools such as Photoshop or picresize.com, doing this will highly boost you website loading speed to less than 3 seconds. Images should always be added after compression to make website faster.

 

2. Evaluate installed plugins and themes.

It is always important to evaluate the plugins and theme you install on our site, some have backlinks which keeps draining your bandwidth while still slowing your site, others have so many libraries and files which “eats’ up” your disk space, ensure that you evaluate and identify the developer before installing.

 

3. Implement files Compression.

Compressing files not only reduces load time for the website but also saves on disk space and the bandwidth, compression lowers the number of bytes sent through a network increasing the speed of transmission, on transmission the user’s browser unzips the files and displays the content normally, implementing GZIP tool will save your site from slow loading since the size of files will be in small, GZIP is supported by most browsers and servers.

 

4. Hosting plan.

Some host plan only allows a certain range or amount of traffic, when the traffic exceed the range limit the website start loading slowly, therefore it is advisable to evaluate the expected traffic and maybe go for a dedicated hosting plan other than shared plan if you expect high traffic to your site, also make a good choice of the host company, it should be fast, efficient and reliable.

 

5. Implement data Caching

Caching involves saving user browsing data in the browser where the data do not need to be reloaded from the original sources whenever the user revisits the site, cached data not only increases the load speed but also reduce traffic on the host server, providing room for more request therefore improving the users experience and loading speed.

 

6. Reduce Https request and external scripts as much as possible

Too many http requests and external scripts and poor website design will definitely slow down your site, since most of the time will be used to load the parts of the webpage and different external scripts are in servers with different response time, always ensure that the requests are not too many and the website designing is well done so as to define a sequence on how different page parts are loaded.

 

7. Implement Content delivery network(CDN)

CDN is a collection of servers which are found in different parts of the world.

CDN involves providing user content based on their geographical where the content is stored to the server closest to the user, this reduces the number of loops the user request will make, therefore increasing the overall loading speed, the pros of CDN is that; data is sent without cookies and in small size, and is sent to the user from the closest location.

Files that can be stored include HTML, CSS, images, Videos and even pdf’s, example of CDN include: Cloudflare, MaxCDN and Amazon CloudFront.

 

8. Minify CSS and JavaScript.

Minifying means, removing unnecessary character, extra space and line breaks without altering the code functionality, minifying JavaScript and CSS files ensure that files load efficiently, since it reduces the amount of data that is to be transferred.

If you have several CSS files for a web page, it is advisable to consolidate the code into one file in order to reduce the number of files loaded, increasing the speed of execution and display.

 

Finally, with the new upcoming technology we believe that more and more efficient technique will come up, meanwhile for the best results you can hire the best website designing company in Gurgaon, Delhi & India and website owners should embrace the available techniques to improve web users experience and in return gain more traffic to their sites.