How To Reduce Website Page Load Time?

Website page loading time is one of the most important aspects that website or software owners must focus on. No one wants to wait forever for a page to load, especially when there are plenty of other websites that offer the same content or services. In fact, research has shown that 47% of users expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. They will likely leave your site if it takes longer than three seconds. So how can you reduce page loading time? Interested?

In this article, we’ll cover how to reduce the load time of a website, the impact of longer page time, and some common tips that you can apply easily. But let’s cover some basics first.

What Is Website Page Loading Time?

Website Page loading time is the amount of time it takes for a web page to be loaded in a browser. This includes all the elements on the page, such as images, text, and scripts. Generally, the more elements there are on a page, the longer it will take to load.

One common example of slow page loading is when a website takes a long time to load its home page. This is often due to the number of images and scripts on the page. Another issue can be with the hosting server. If it is overloaded or not configured properly, it can cause pages to load slowly.

What Are The Negative Impacts Of Higher Page load time of a website?

For newbie developers who are just beginning their careers or are just learning how to become a software engineer, they should know how a higher load time impacts them and their organization’s credibility. Of course, you can tweak changes when they arise but think for a moment if you already have the required knowledge that can save you time and help you stand out from your peers. 

Here is a List of Disadvantages of Higher Page Loading Time:

• Slower page loading time can lead to a loss of business, as users will be more likely to go to a competitor’s website that loads faster.
• A slow website can also hurt your credibility as a developer or business owner.
• It can also lead to a decrease in search engine ranking, as Google takes page loading time into consideration when ranking websites on its search engines.
• Users are generally more impatient nowadays, so waiting for a page to load is not ideal for customer retention.

Tips To Reduce The Website Page Load Time

There are a number of things you can do to help reduce the load time of a website. Here are five tips that are often overlooked but can make a big difference:

1. Optimize Images

One of the main reasons pages take a long time to load is because of the number of images on them. Usually, websites have lots of image files in the form of GIF, PNG, and JPEG. But most of the developers don’t optimize them for better page load speed. So, make sure your images are optimized so they don’t take up too much space and slow down the loading process. You can use online tools or software to help you with this.

Quick Tips: 

• Use PNG images, as it provides a better compression ratio without losing visual quality.
• Use video elements instead of GIF files.

2. Reduce the Number of Scripts on your Page

Scripts can also slow down a website’s page loading time. If you don’t need all of them, get rid of the ones you don’t need. This will help reduce the load on your server and make your page faster.

Quick Tips: 

• Get rid of useless social media plugins like Twitter or any other marketing scripts.
• Identify and throw away any third-party integrations and external scripts that slow down your website 

3. Optimize the Host Server

If you don’t have a VPS or dedicated hosting plan, make sure you optimize your shared web hosting plan as much as possible to ensure it can handle the number of visitors who come to your website daily. If it is not optimized, pages will take longer than they should load and you could experience downtime.

Quick Tips: 

• Buy hosting from a believable vendor.
• Avoid using shared hosting, as it can crash whenever your website experiences peak traffic.

4. Compress Files such as Scripts and CSS

Another way of improving the page load time of a website is by compressing all the scripts and CSS on your site so they are smaller in size and load more quickly on any device. You can use online tools to do this or software such as WinZip or WinRAR. For CSS files, try using Gzip rather than standard compression because it is much better.

Quick Tips:

• Delete unnecessary spaces, characters, comments, and other unneeded elements to reduce the size of the files.
• Search for badly written code and replace it with cleaner code.

5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN can help to reduce loading time by storing cached versions of your web pages in various worldwide servers so when users visit your site, their nearest server delivers the content, making it load faster. This means you don’t have to use as much bandwidth since visitors are downloading from a local source rather than accessing your site directly and this, in turn, reduces the load time of a website and improves overall performance.

Quick Tips:

• Leverage multiple CDNs to avoid page loading issues.
• Use authentic CDN that has a reputation to solve such problems.

Conclusion

Website page loading time can have a huge impact on the success of a business. If you want to reduce the page loading time of a web application for both your website and software, check out the tips that we’ve mentioned in this article.

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