In the early days of internet usage, users did not mind waiting for minutes for a page to load and their website requests to be answered. As time passed, internet speeds picked up to a point where we can download torrential data in a matter of few seconds. Users hate waiting for sites to respond and even go away if a page loads slowly. Since internet speeds are no longer the problem, it is the web design of your website that dictates how pages load and respond. Therefore, you must improve your web design if you want to optimize your website for speed and performance. Here are a few handy tips to make your website respond faster.
Simplify what you are doing
The primary reason sites respond slowly is because they try to cater to too many things at the same time. Webmasters tend to make unwise choices when it comes to keeping their sites compatible with tools that are and were in vogue. A particular version of web browser might have been extremely popular in the past, but your current website need not be optimized for that. You have not only increased your work but also forced your webpage to remain compatible with some protocol that might become obsolete in a few months.
Leave the baggage
Continuing with what we said in the point above, you must learn to leave the excess baggage that your website carries. As a responsible webmaster, you must trim your website periodically to ensure that only relevant and useful code stays on it. Images are usually the sore thumb of web design since they take up a lot of bandwidth and are also the slowest to load. As much as possible, look at your image files from time to time and see if they really need to be there in those file sizes. Can you convert them to smaller sizes without compromising their quality? If you can, then you must!
CSS
CSS has really changed the way websites work and respond. But just because you can override HTML with some short snippet of a code, does not mean you do so every single time. Organize your CSS so that it does not overload your server with loads of information to process, instead try to make the most out of CSS with the least amount of CSS. Everybody likes websites that load fast and have a style of their own. Use CSS wisely to achieve both these things.
Think search engines
Site speed and performance is something that even search engines consider when they rank you in their search results. No search engine would want to list a site that does not load properly as its top result and damn its own reputation. So, if not for anything else, optimize your site for better search rankings and increasing your visibility on the internet.
Mobile Future
But the most important of all, optimize your site for the future that is coming. Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have now superseded computers as the devices of choice to access information. These are devices with smaller processors and access memories and smaller allocations of internet resources. Your ‘made for computer’ website is likely to scare away the new generation of information seekers who like web pages that can adapt quickly to their device.
So, if you are looking to stay relevant in the future, optimize your site for its web design, speed and performance today!
