Website loading time is a statistic, that measures the amount of visitors you get on your website or your blog. Definitely, a website which loads faster will attract more visitors, as compared to a website which loads slower. Google also ranks you based on your website loading time and the size of the page. There are various ways using which you can figure out these statistics, but the most common tool that I use is the Pingdom Tools. Head over to their website to know more about your website.
There are various ways by which you can speed up your website loading time. These ways can include you buying something to boost your website loading time, or just performing some actions manually to make your website load faster. I will share with you both these ways to speed up your website loading time. So, let’s get started.
Sign up for a CDN Service
A CDN or a Content Delivery(or Distribution) Network is a large distributed system of servers, whose goal is to serve content to the end-user with high availability and high performance. They speed up the loading time of a webpage by deploying several servers for specific things. These most popular CDN service providers are CloudFlare and MaxCDN. CloudFlare is free to use for a website, but can also be purchased for a pro package. MaxCDN offers only paid service. In my opinion, you can try out both these services and then decide which one you want to continue with!
Cache Pages using a Plugin
If you use a Content Management System on your website, like WordPress, you can definitely use a Page Caching plugin, which will enable you to reduce the load on your web server and also serve your webpages to the end-user pretty fast. If you use a different CMS, I am sure you can find some or the other Caching Plugins to fit your CMS. If you need my help in that, be sure to drop a comment below.
Compress CSS and JavaScript files
Practically any webpage that is built today consists of some CSS and JavaScript files. And the developers, always create these files in an understandable way for fellow humans. But the computer does not need to have the file in that way, you can simply compress the files to create comparatively smaller files. Earlier I shared an article on how to compress CSS files. If you missed that article, head over to that article and read how to compress CSS files. In a similar way, you can compress JavaScript files as well. To compress JavaScript files, you can head over to this website and compress those files.
Lazy Loading Images
Lazy Loading images is another technique that you can definitely implement on your webpage. It is a technique that lets you load only the pictures that can currently be seen by the end-user at the moment and as soon as the user scrolls down on the page, other images that can be seen are then made visible to the user by loading at that time. This reduces the initial page loading time and as the user goes on reading the page, the images are loaded. If you want to Lazy Load Images, follow this simple guide that I wrote a few weeks back.
Better Hosting
If none of the above works, maybe your current hosting can not handle the traffic on your website, or maybe the hosting server is over sold or has overused resources. If you are on a shared hosting plan, you can upgrade to a VPS(Virtual Private Server), or even to a dedicated server if you think that is what your website requires at this stage.
These were a few things that you can consider doing if you want your blog or website to load faster. I hope this article helped you in one or the other way. Do let me know in the comments section if there are any other ways you prefer and also, let me know if you face any problem! Stay subscribed to Slash Coding via RSS Feeds, Facebook, or Twitter.
