Top 5 steps to speed up your website

Websites of 2020 and beyond will certainly contain a lot more content than they did in 2010. With the ultimate goal of maximizing "user experience", pages often contain a lot of files. Large, high-quality photos, animations, clips, videos .

The story is no longer just about website order in the search engine rankings. Page load speed is now also a deciding factor when it comes to user experience, having a direct impact on the increase and decrease in conversion rates.

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Every second of slow loading has the potential to lose visitors and customers right on the page. This makes speed an extremely important factor. Thankfully, there are a few methods we can do to improve this website slow loading problem.

The first step to improving page load speed is to check how the current speed is doing with some tools, such as Pagespeed Insights. The tool will provide a detailed, reference description of your desktop and mobile page load speed and point out what needs improvement.

The first metric of a website's speed is the total file size of the images, scripts, and files needed to render the page properly. Reducing the amount of information needed to load the page increases the speed of loading. Research in 2018 shows that most websites weigh between 1.3 and 2.5 MB, although the recommendation is below 500K.

If the page load speed is too slow, immediately consider reducing the file size on your website using the following methods.

1. Zoom out an image

It is possible that images on the website are being displayed smaller than they really are. In this case you can use a simple tool like ResizeImage.net to resize the image to save storage space and minimize load time.

Another way to shrink the image size is to use a different format. Example: Convert .png to .jpg compressed without affecting the display quality of the image much.

2. Improved JavaScript and CSS

Instead of repeating the code on each page, move the CSS rules or JavaScript snippets to an external file. The biggest advantage of this approach is that it only needs to load once for each visit. So instead of loading dozens or hundreds of lines of code, you just need to reference the script or stylesheet that was downloaded earlier. Thanks to that, the improvement of javascript and CSS helps to improve the page loading speed on the website stably and perfectly.

3. Use cache

Content management systems (like WordPress) have plugins that keep track of the latest versions of pages. They then show these archives to the user, so the browser doesn't have to reload the page repeatedly. Plugins like WP Super Cache will help you speed up your upload significantly.

4. Delete the redirect

Some redirects you might use are permanent 301 redirects and temporary 307 redirects. However, owning too many redirects will confuse the browser, leading to slow loading. So you need to check the redirects and simplify them as much as possible. The Google PageSpeed ​​Insights tool will let you know which redirects are active on your website.

5. Use CDN (Content Delivery Network - Content Delivery Network)

It can be said that this is the most optimal and effective method because you can ignore all 5 ways above. No need to possess difficult technical knowledge, no need to spend time manipulating individual tools, bypassing optimization on each factor, .

CDN can be said as an "all in one" solution, with outstanding features:

1. "Cache" content (including images, videos, webpage .) in physical servers is located closer to the end user than the original server. Since the server is closer to the user, the CDN will send the content at a faster rate.
2. Optimize CSS and JS; streamlining image metadata; compress images to reduce the size, maintain the quality; automatic image resizing; optimize page loading speed by Progressive Image Loading
3. Simple and fast operation after just a few minutes of integration

Marvin Fry

Update 27 November 2020