Most of the new websites have faced loading time issues at least once in the lifetime of a website.
Some of us have resolved these issues to a certain extent. But not all of us can boast that they have resolved all the issues related to website speed forever.
The Need for Website Speed Optimization
According to industry standards, if a page on your website takes more than 4 seconds to load; it is deemed that your site is facing speed issues.
Website speed optimization not only helps you to retain your customers but also improve your credibility.
If you want your website to rank higher in Google Rankings, page loading time plays an important part.
Tools to Identify and Improve Website Speed
Website optimization tools can be speed measurement tools; image optimization tools, image compression tools, cache clearance tools, Content delivery network tools. I am listing some of the tools which I found useful.
Google PageSpeed Insights:- It is a tool from Google which shows the page loading speed for your website and also analyses the issues related to page speed. This tool also gives you solutions to enhance the page performance.
GTmetrix- It is a free tool that uses Yslow and Page speed to create a score for your pages.
Pingdom Speed test: This is another tool that helps you to understand the page loading time and suggests the alternatives to improve the page speed.
How to Speed-up your Website
There are a lot of ways that help you to speed up your website. I am listing a few of them below for the ease of understanding.
1. Minimize the size of Images: Image size if heavy, take a lot of time to load; and that harms the overall speed of your website. You can reduce the size of the images with the image optimization tools and image compression tools effectively.
2. Optimize your media files (images, whitepapers, videos, etc.): Image optimization helps you to optimize images you're uploading on your website.
This, in turn, helps to reduce the time required to load the page enhancing your page speed. But, optimizing images alone won’t help you to speed up your site.
You will also need to optimize other types of assets such as whitepapers, e-books, or videos you are uploading on the website.
3. Clear Cache for WordPress: Clearing up the cache files from your website ultimately helps you to improve the page speed as the unnecessary files are removed.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network for ex Cloudflare: A content delivery network (CDN) is a system which comprises distributed servers net which delivers pages and other content hosted on the website to a user, from the origin of the webpage concerning content delivery server to the geographic locations of the user.
5. Host your site on a semi-dedicated or dedicated server: Hosting your website on a shared server sometimes affects your website's performance if the traffic on your website is massive.
I would advise you to move from a shared server to a semi-dedicated server or if you have a good amount of budget to a dedicated server.
Optimizing your website is an ever going task, and you will need to optimize the pages and other parts at a defined set interval of time.
The tools mentioned above will definitely help you to improve your website's speed and help you to optimize its performance.
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