Guide to speed up website loading in a simple way

Web loading speed is an important factor that directly affects website ranking and SEO results. As technology advances, users become less patient, always wanting to find the information they need in seconds, regardless of what device they're using. If your website does not meet these needs, you will be ignored mercilessly.

According to Kissmetrics, 47% of users expect a website to load in about 2 seconds, 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, if your website is too slow, you can hardly achieve the keyword target, affecting the input rating for Google ranking algorithm (Google ranking Algorithm).

So how can you improve page load speed quickly and effectively? Let's find out how to fix TipsMake.com in the following article.

1. Using CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Hosting a website's file on a network of content delivery servers is one of the best ways to speed up your website, which can often save up to 60% of the bandwidth and halve the site's number of requests. you give. 

CDN works by hosting website files on a large worldwide network of servers. For example, when users access your site from Thailand, they are downloading files from the server closest to them. Because the bandwidth is spread across many different servers, it will reduce the load required when used on only one server, this way also protects the web from DDoS attacks and increases traffic.

Amazon Cloudfront is a great CDN that helps users remove static resources such as CSS , javascript and background images to reduce server load. This makes the website faster. MaxCDN is also another popular CDN that when combined with TotalCache it can send entire websites to a CDN system using compression to achieve super fast download speeds.

2. Use caching plugin

This is the most important plugin to help reduce server load and speed up the website by caching pages as html files and speeding pages down the browser. Some popular and free plugins you can use are WP - Supercache, QuickCache or W3 - TotalCache.

3. Delete unused plugins

If the current website is running too many plugins, this is the culprit that slows down your page loading speed. Not only that, the use of many plugins is also the reason that makes the site vulnerable to security risks. Please note that only essential and safe plugins should be kept.

To do this, you can use tools like GTMetrix or Google Pagespeed Insights to check, then go to the list of plugins that are in use and turn off unnecessary or long-gone components. Next, retry the page speed to see if your website is running faster.

4. Clean up the database

One of the difficulties if you are using WordPress is that the database can get cluttered very quickly due to saved drafts, post modifications, disabled plugins . WP Optimize is a plugin. Great for regularly deleting all things that clutter up the database.

Testing on the database of TipsMake.com, I found that the database result decreased from 3mb to 3mb, helping to speed up the time the browser collects and returns files from the database.

5. Compress web pages with Gzip

Gzip is a simple method, compressing website files into zip files to save bandwidth and speed up page loading time. When used, the user browser will extract the file and display the required content. This solution makes transferring content from server to browser more efficient and saves a lot of time.

You can enable Gzip by adding the following code to your .htaccess file:

# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml: AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript # Or, compress certain file types by extension: SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

To check if Gzip works on your website, visit Gziptest.comto check it out.

6. Put JS and CSS in separate files

If your website is loading too slowly, it is likely due to too many Javascript and CSS files, because if each HTML document contains separate Scripts and CSS, it will be downloaded every time the HTML file is call, caching and increasing HTML file size.

To resolve this issue, minimize these files. You can package all JavaScript and CSS individually into a single file to simply maintain and update the data.

Another way you can also use is to delete the spaces in the file and your file will be automatically smaller. If you are using WordPress, WP Minify will be a great option, helping you do all this work.

7. Replace PHP with static HTML if possible

 HP is a great choice to help your website run efficiently and minimize the work of entering an information multiple times. However, calling information via PHP uses quite a lot of system resources, so consider replacing it with HTML.

8. Limit use of @import

Similarly, @import uses more system resources than linking directly to your stylesheets, and the results of these two uses are the same. So there is no reason to use a way to make the website slower. Another reason is that some older browsers no longer support @import.

9. Put CSS at the top and JS at the bottom

This is considered the best place to place the CSS, as close to the top of the page as possible, because the browser will display the CSS file first. In contrast, JavaScript should be placed as close to the bottom of the page as possible so as not to affect the page load.

10. Use a few images, combining using CSS Image Sprite 

Reducing the image size seems to eliminate colors, which will help to load the image faster, although the image quality will be poor. Also, upload as few images as possible on the page. Many recommended plugins like Smush- it use to compress images on server. Users can use CSS Sprites to combine images. Remember to always specify the size for the image.

CSS Image Sprite is a collection of decorative images such as icons or buttons in a single image file, then uses the CSS background property to show the correct location.

Websites with lots of images often take a long time to load and create many server requests, so using sprite images will reduce the request load to the server, reduce image file size, increase download speed page and save system resources.