7 tips for optimizing page load time?

Do you know that more than 83% visitors expect a page to load within 3 seconds or less and more than 40% visitors abandon a webpage if it takes more than 3 seconds to load?

The web page load time is a crucial factor that determines whether a visitor will indulge in your page or part his way. In fact, Google considers page load time to be one of the 200 factors that influence a website’s position in the organic search results. In addition to losing traffic and page views, a slow webpage also has adverse effects on ROI and conversions.

No matter how typical and unique your website’s niche maybe, there ought to be plenty other websites of the same niche crawling in the web. The competition is tight and you don’t want to lose out on traffic by delivering a slow webpage. The importance of delivering rich usability without damaging the look and functionality of your website is becoming crucial every day. If your website does not load quickly, it is very likely that your competitors will steal your visitors in a matter of seconds.

Below are some tips that can help you optimize your page load time

• 1. Optimize image size to reduce average page load time
  Optimise the size of your images to ensure faster loading time. High resolution images can take up a lot of bandwidth and affect your website’s loading time. It is important to use external photo editors like photoshop to reduce the size of your images. It is recommended to keep image size under 100kb to achieve a quick page load time.

• 2. Optimize dependencies
  Many plugins are blatantly unnecessary. Such unnecessary plugins may slow down your website’s loading speed. The wiser step is to replace these unnecessary plugins with other solutions. For example a social share plugin can be replaced with a CMS with built in social plugins.

  Similarly, though it is wise to use a tracking software to keep a tab on your site’s traffic, it is not advisable to use multiple tracking softwares as it may hinder the website’s page load time.

• 3. Take advantage of caching
  Every time a visitor loads a site, the CSS and JAVA files loads as well, which takes a lot of loading time. By using caching correctly, the browser will fetch data from the local directory instead of sending server requests every time the visitor visits the website. This makes return visits quicker and more efficient for the returning visitor.

• 4. Do away with redirects
  Redirects requires an additional HTTP which increases the page load time. Avoiding redirects can speed up your load time. It is advisable to serve the site to the users directly and checking for broken links and fixing them ASAP.

• 5. Minify Java Script and CSS
  Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from the source code without changing its functionality. Removing or renaming variable to shorter names subsequently reduces overall bandwidth consumption and improves caching.

• 6. Use content delivery network
  CDN is a network that delivers webpages and other web content to a user based on his geographical location and current bandwidth usage.

  Below are some well known CDN which can help reduce the page load time.

  >> CloudFlare

  >> MaxCDN

  >> EdgeCast

• 7. Reduce HTTP requests
  By combining your javascript files into a single script, you can save space and reduce requests. Similarly, use CSS Sprites to reduce the number of image requests. You can also consider combining all inline images into your cached stylesheets. You can greatly reduce load time by combining all javascript files into a single script and all CSS files in a single style sheet and keeping both of them separate.