As a website owner, you should never underestimate the impact site speed has on traffic, conversions, and revenue. Research conducted found out that 47% people expect a website to load in two seconds or less, and 40% of those participating in the survey said theyÕd likely abandon a web page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
So, before you release your website to proverbially “end for itself” out there, follow these quick steps to improve its performance.
Top 5 tips to boost website performance
1. Use CSS in place of images: It doesn’t come as any surprise that high-quality images cause a dip in the loading speed of a page. However, using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) will enable you to create high-quality preview visuals without the need for images. As a result, your website will load faster due to less load coming from rendering large images.
2. Optimize images: As a general rule of thumb, it can be said that the larger the image, the lower is the load speed. If the area where the image is to be placed has a maximum width of 300 px, you should crop the picture to 300 pixels wide and save it at 72DPI. Then save your image in an appropriate format including, JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF based on whatÕs needed.
3. Optimize for mobile users: Mobile users are different from desktop users typically want data in bits and pieces that make sense. Optimizing design for mobile devices is a great way to gain a competitive advantage since there are so many websites that are failing to keep up with the expectations of mobile users.
Here are few things you can do to make your site friendlier:
- Use CSS3 instead of image graphics to stimulate effects
- Eliminate all unnecessary image assets
- Use adaptive images fit for smaller devices
- Make design to be mobile-centric
4. Simplify code by minimizing the role of HTML, CSS, Javascript: To enhance your website’s performance, it’s crucial that you get rid of line breaks, extra spaces, and indentations in your code to make the pages as lean as possible. Do these tasks by using tools like YUI Compressor, CSS Minifier, Google Closure Compiler, etc.
5. Make Javascript External and CSS improve load speed: By using external files, you can use the pages to load faster because CSS files and JavaScript are cached by the browser. Alternatively, if you utilize CSS in a page, place the CSS in its HEAD element. This should make the page appear as if it’s loading faster while it loads progressively.