There are several ways to increase your website’s speed. Among them are optimizing images, minimizing redirect chains, minimizing JavaScript, and deferring script loading. Performing a site audit is also an effective way to identify slow pages. Performing an audit will help you to find out where you can improve your website’s speed.
Minimizing redirect chains
Minimizing redirect chains is an important way for website performance improvement and avoid page load time problems. These chains are caused by a number of factors. The most common culprit is extra JavaScript and CSS files, but you should also consider the impact of third-party integrations. You can use a tool like Chrome’s Developer Tools to identify the culprits. This way, you can make the necessary changes to minimize these problems.
Related: Website Speed and Performance Optimization Best Practices
Redirect chains slow down your website by using three or more requests to download the same file. They also slow down the crawling process and decrease the rankings of your website. Search engines are also less likely to rank a website with many redirects, so you must reduce them as much as possible. Fortunately, there are some automated tools that can identify redirect chains and prevent them from slowing down your site.
Optimizing JavaScript
Optimizing JavaScript processing is crucial for modern websites. It accounts for about 15 percent of the page weight on desktop browsers, and up to 16 percent on mobile browsers. On average, desktop pages have around 400 KB of JavaScript content, and mobile pages have almost three times that. Just one connection to load a page transfers 14 KB of data, so it is important to optimize this code for website speed.
JavaScript is essential for building an engaging website, but it also affects page load time. As it is a dynamic language, it has to load before it can function, and this means that the size and delivery of a JavaScript file is a key factor. JavaScript processes data in-line once it is received by a browser, so the file size and delivery time is higher than for other file types.
Deferring loading scripts
When a website uses scripts, deferring their loading can increase website speed. This technique downloads scripts in parallel to HTML parsing, delaying their execution until the HTML has completed. This is especially helpful when a page contains a lot of JavaScript.
Unlike async, defer does not block the browser while it loads the script. Instead, it postspones the execution of the script until the DOM has been completely loaded. Deferred javascript still needs to be executed, but it is much faster than normal javascript.
A website can become slower if it has too many third-party resources embedded in its pages. Using lazy-loading can improve page speed and paint metrics by letting users see the main content of the page without waiting for external resources to load. Especially ads are good candidates for lazy-loading.
Enabling browser caching
Caching is a technique for reducing the time it takes to load web pages. It works by instructing your browser to keep the resources on your website in its cache instead of downloading them. Once they are in the cache, the browser can pull them when they need them. Caching can also help to speed up your website by reducing the number of requests and receiving and parsing them.
To enable browser caching, you need to add a couple of headers to your web server. The first is Cache-Control, which tells the browser where the cached files are stored, and the second is Expires, which tells the browser when the cached resource is no longer valid. Different server platforms may use one or both of these headers, but they all have the same effect.