Website speed, one topic that comes up every time one searches solutions to have great website traffic, Why? Because it caters to users looking for relevant content instantly and has the patience for websites with poor load speeds or inadequate performance.

Various studies have shown results that web users expect a site to load within a couple of seconds and if it takes longer, those users tend to abandon the site. So, from low bounce rate to losing prospective customers, so while time (essentially in seconds) matters so much, why not make the most out of it?

HOW? Well, here are some tips for you to optimize your website for the best speed:

Optimize HTTP requests:

These Hypertext Transfer Protocol Requests are counted whenever a browser fetches a file, page, or picture from a web server. You increase the number of the requests and you will see that the browser is unable to allow simultaneous connections per and it is going to take longer for the page to go and retrieve them. Ultimately it leads to increasing your web page's load time.

• Keep your website design simple
• Combine CSS and Javascript files into one larger file (same for JS).
• Use queries to only load only what is useful for certain devices or viewports.
• Reduce the number of images you use, and avoid them especially if their file sizes are big. (explained below).

WEBSITE IMAGES

Having mentioned images, they do play a crucial role and using large images and videos will slow down your website. So what to do?

• Make sure that you resize and compress it to the lowest size possible but without sacrificing too much of the quality before uploading.
• Use online image resizing tools you can use to resize your images.
• Optimise all images including libraries of icons, extra fonts, and images that maybe could be replicated with CSS.
• Keep all your images below 150KB, 1920px in width, at an average/medium/72dpi quality level.

CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK

Most suitable for those who cater to an audience distant from where the servers hosting your website are, your website takes more time to load and makes your website load slower. So, the solution for people with websites targeted at users all over the world or in distant places, it is best to use a Content Delivery Network. 

A Content Delivery Network has virtual servers located in all parts of the world, it responds as soon as a user visits your website as it loads your web page content from the virtual server that is closest to the visitor.

Browser caching: This simple step allows assets on your website to be downloaded to your hard drive once into a cache, or temporary storage space. Stored locally on your system, which allows subsequent page loads to increase in speed.

As users now have some important file locally, they will experience a faster page loading time. How long can it last? Well, CSS, JS, and images, and media files should have expirations of one week, while third party items such as widgets or ads only last a day.

BACK TO BASICS OF WEBSITE CRAFTING, CHECK THESE TIPS OUT

• Web Hosting: It is indeed a crucial part of the website and it is only logical to see its role in the page speed. It should be a well-analysed factor on the list of must-haves in the process of choosing a web hosting platform for your website.

Not only does your hosting type matters, like shared, or dedicated, the company also matters. It is a big decision, so if you still find out after working on all the given factors that the website speed is not fast, you can go through the options of many website hosting service providing companies present there today and witness the change it makes on your website speed.

• Post Website hosting, how can we forget website theme, remember us telling you about keeping your website simple, well, website theme can also affect the speed of your website as some may contain so many long codes that send too many requests. Since a huge number of JavaScript and CSS codes cause a website to lag, it is best to go for themes that are optimised for speed, and not just design.
• Creating a website is incomplete without plug-ins of all sorts to add extra functionality to a website. But, it is also true that they also take up space on our website and come with an additional set of codes and with too many HTTP requests, it can cause the website to load slowly. So, make sure you remove any plugin that you are not using on your website. Don't just deactivate plugins, make sure you delete them completely from your website to help increase website speed.