When any new applications come out, many rush to be the first to see and review it. When there’s hot news, people are glued to their TV screens waiting for updates and it’s no surprise people expect this same type of agility when they are browsing the web. They want their user experience unhindered so they can receive the information they were looking for. One should actually understand the Importance of Website Load Time and Ways to Improve Performance.
Many people have no patience for websites with poor load speeds or inadequate performance. In a recent study about half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. If it isn’t loaded within 3 seconds, those users are actually tended to abandon the site.
This means you’re not only losing your current visitors and decreasing conversion rates. Also you run the risk of site loosing traffic from those customers who might have referred your website to others. Your users expect web pages to load fast, and let’s take a look at ways to optimize your website for the best possible performance.
Minimize HTTP Requests
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol requests are counted whenever a browser fetches a file, page, or picture from a web server. This actually means that the more HTTP requests you require to load, the longer it takes for the page to go and retrieve them all, increasing your web page’s load time.
How to Decrease HTTP Requests
There are best tactics you can use to decrease HTTP requests to relieve your browser.
Combining CSS/JS Files
Try combining your CSS files into one larger file (same for JS). Managing to merge them will ultimately assist your load times in the long run.
Use queries to only load what’s required
Using conditional statements to load them can be a great way to increase speed.
Reduce the number of images you use
It might not only help reduce image HTTP requests but may improve your UX by removing distracting images that don’t correspond to your written content.
CSS Sprites
Accessing the images using CSS background-image and background-position prevents your browser from constantly trying to retrieve several images every time certain pages on your site load.
Use CDNs & Remove Unused Scripts/Files
CDN is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations so content could be more effectively delivered to users. CDNs are primarily used for static content or files that do require being touched once uploaded.
Browser Caching
Primarily the browser caching permits assets on your website to be downloaded to your hard drive once into a cache, or a temporary storage space. Those files are now actually stored locally on your system, which permits subsequent page loads to increase in speed.
Compress Images & Optimize Files
It is enumerated that images presently take up 60% of the average bytes loaded per page, around 1504KB. When compared to other pages assets namely as scripts (399KB), CSS (45KB), and video (294KB), images take up quite a large amount of HTTP requests sent. So try to keep all your images below 150KB, nothing above 1920px in width, at an average/medium/72dpi quality level.
