How to increase the website Speed?

Do you think the speed of your website can influence your business? Or do you think by increasing the website speed you can actually optimize the conversion rate?

The Great Customer Expectations: What do we have?

• 47% of consumers want a web page to load in two seconds or less.
• 44% of customers will speak about their bad online shopping experience.
• 79% of shoppers (dissatisfied) are most likely to visit that website again.

Some tips and tricks everyone should be looking for, let’s analyze and learn how we can increase the speed of your website and thereby increase the conversion rate.

4 Tips to Increase the Website Speed

• MINIMIZE HTTP REQUESTS
  • What is HTTP and when does an HTTP request is sent?
  • HTTP stands for ‘hyper text transfer protocol’. Every time a user wants to fetch a file (image, page, or multimedia) he will send a request from his web browser (Firefox, Chrome) to web server (host). Since HTTP is a request protocol, the request will be made through it.
  • The request line usually begins with either ‘GET’ or ‘POST’ word.
    • i. GET-request – To download resources ( Images & Pages)
    • ii. POST-request- To pass the data to a server (uploading file)
  • Just think, every time, for every element, if we keep on sending requests how long will a page take to render? More the files more will be the requests affecting the website performance. Now, how to tackle this?
    • i. Combine and inline the CSS scripts
    • ii. Inline the smaller JavaScripts; if not combine them
    • iii. Reduce the number of images utilized for designs and functions
    • iv. Introduce Base64-Encoded Data URLs
• REDUCE THE SERVER RESPONSE TIME
  • The page loading speed can actually make or break the reputation of a website, why and how?
  • A bad loading speed will never let a user get to know about your website, do you know that? Now, what is server response time? And what does it measure?
  • ‘The amount of time taken by a web server in responding to the request made by a web browser.’ The server response time measures the amount of time consumed in loading an HTML to start rendering the page from your web server.
  • “What GOOGLE says – The server response time should be under 200ms”
  • And if not,
    • i. Identify and address the performance bottleneck issues
    • ii. Fix the slow database queries, slow routing, CPU starvation, or memory starvation
    • iii. Utilize the right web hosting solution
• Gzip COMPRESSION
  • Conserve the bandwidth; increase the speed of your website. In simple and better words, people will find the download time very fast. Let me get into the technical side of this.
  • A 100KB file is seriously something to look out for. How do you normally send a request to the server asking for this file?
  • GET me/index.html
  • Now, use the Gzip compression and zip that 100KB file, how will it look?
  • index.html.zip
  • By sending a zipped file, a lot can be saved in terms of bandwidth consumed and the download time.
• BROWSER CACHING
  • What is caching?
  • Cache is a temporary storage area, caching is the temporary storage of web contents (HTML pages, files, web objects, images).
  • Why caching is done?
  • So that the browser can access the cache instead of original server to have the files (reduces both traffic and time).
  • What is a browser caching?
  • The browsers cache the files from the websites you visit. The browser stores the information on your computer’s hard drive. The information here is known as static assets, which includes images, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
  • So, what is the benefit? It improves and speeds up the browsing time.