21 Tricks To Boost Your Website Speed

The speed of your website can have a large impact on traffic, conversions, and revenue.  As a performance metric, speed should not be underestimated.  According to Akami, nearly half of all Internet users expect a web page to load in under two seconds, and 40% of users will click out of a website if it takes over three seconds to load.

In “Why Web Performance Matters: Is Your Site Driving Customers Away?”, a 2010 study by Gomez that surveyed 1,500 online shoppers about how website performance affects their online behavior, we learn the following:

• “An increase in website loading time from 2 to 10 seconds increased page abandonment rate by 38%.”
• “During peak traffic periods, more than 75% of consumers left for a competitor’s website instead of suffering a delay.”

To further emphasize the impact that website speed has on consumer behavior, the study by Aberdeen Group reveals that a mere one second delay in loading time yields a 7% decrease in website conversions.  Additionally, page views decrease by 11%, and customer satisfaction falls by 16%.  As if this wasn’t enough to hit home and have us racing to optimize our website loading time, owners should also be aware that Google uses website speed as a factor in ranking your site on its search results page.

In summary, a slow website will result in the following:

• Less traffic and page views
• Decreased conversions
• Drops in sales
• A negatively impacted brand image

As a leading resource on how to create a successful website, HostingFacts.com presents the following tips and tricks on how to boost your website speed.  In this guide, we will touch on the following points:

Consider the case study by Mike, in which he analyzed his website speed and optimized it so that it went from a 4.23 second loading time to just a 1.33 second loading time.  Why was his website so slow?  One word.  Plugins.

Unnecessary plugins and add-ons can dramatically affect your website speed.  In Mike’s case, he found that an astounding 86% of his website loading time was due to plugins.  If you use utilizing CMSs like WordPress (users may want to install the P3, or Plugin Performance Profiler, which will scan your WordPress plugins to locate bottlenecks and generate a report of how each plugin affect your website performance), Drupal, or Joomla, it is critical that you pay attention to plugins and add-ons which could be slowing down your website.

In addressing this issue, it is crucial to not only focus on the number of plugins that you have installed, but also the quality of those plugins.  Pay attention to plugins that load excessive scripts and styles.  Also, eliminate plugins that perform lots of remote requests, as well as plugins that increase the number of database queries on each page of your website.

Bottom line: use plugins that are only absolutely necessary for enhancing the functionality of your website.  Discard the rest.

Do not fall for the misconception that having a plethora of social sharing buttons on your website is always a good thing.  It isn’t.  There are few, if any studies, which prove any kind of significant increase in website traffic due to having social sharing buttons.  All it does is confuse your visitors.

Since most social sharing buttons run JavaScript, having too many buttons can create website performance issues.  When a social media site has an outage, there can be significant ramifications for websites with that button installed.

Rather than have an assortment of buttons, edit them down to the essentials, or else set them to load asynchronously so that outages do not negatively impact the speed of your website.

As you know, the speed of the server is a key contributor to the speed of your website.  More server requests mean a slower website.  To address this issue, make use of Expires Headers.

Expires Headers decrease the load time for returning visitors by telling their browser when to request files from the server or when to load the file from the browser cache.  For example, you can configure the Expires Header only to request a certain file once every month, and until then, the file will be stored and loaded from the cache.

Your website will benefit from the use of Expires Headers in two ways.  First, it will reduce the number of HTTP requests on the server.  Second, since the same file is not being requested over and over again, the load on your server will be less.

To make use of Expires Headers on your website, follow this tutorial by GTmetrix.

Caching greatly reduces the loading time of your site by storing a version of your website on the visitor’s browser and loading that version every time they return.  The cache is then stored and used until the website is updated or you set it to refresh.

According to research, utilizing a full cache for a website has a staggering impact on the loading time: from 2.4 seconds down to 0.9 seconds!

To enable caching, you must first determine which platform you are using.  You can install the plugins below if you are using WordPress:

• W3 Total Cache
• W3 Super Cache

One of the best advanced caching and performance optimization plugins out there on the market right now is WP Rocket.  It requires an investment, but the results are worth it.  If you are using Drupal as a platform, follow this guide on optimization techniques.

For further information on how to enable caching, follow these excellent tutorials:

• How to Optimize Your Site with HTTP Caching
• Leverage browser caching by Gtmetrix

Websites that are hosted on U.S. servers will load faster for users in the U.S. (or visitors with a U.S. VPN service).  However, users from other parts of the globe will experience a slower website.  To solve this issue, make use of a Content Delivery Network, or CDN, which will redistribute your website files across a network of servers located in different parts of the world.  This will speed up your website considerably for users in other countries.

In a case study by Matthew Woodward, using a CDN was shown to increase the speed of a website by as much as 60%.

Below are two of the best CDN options available:

• Cloudflare (featuring a perfectly fine free plan)
• KeyCDN

It must be said that sometimes you just need to go with a better web host.  If you have been working hard to make your website faster and have exhausted all other possibilities, but are still experiencing a slow loading time, it may be time to change your web host.

Marcus Taylor, in Smashing Magazine, discussed how two of his clients, who both had similar websites, were utilizing different hosting providers and were experiencing drastic differences in website response times.  The client who was using a reliable, dedicated server to host his site experienced a 7 millisecond DNS response time, and the client who was using a cheap server was experiencing a 250 millisecond DNS response time.  Plugins and tweaks will only get you so far without a quality web host.

Due to the importance of choosing a good web host, it is recommended to read through hosting reviews to determine which web host will best serve your website’s needs.  You should also compare web hosts so you can make the most informed decision.

Here at HostingFacts.com, we have done our homework and have found the top three best hosting providers to yield a loading time of fewer than 500 milliseconds:

1. A2 Hosting – approximately 300 milliseconds
2. SiteGround – approximately 400 milliseconds
3. HostGator Cloud – approximately 500 milliseconds

Using builders like Wix eliminates the need to find a quality web host, but for the rest of us, it is important to do our homework to find the best option.

PageSpeed is an open source server module that improves your website speed by making changes and adjustments to the server and files according to best practices.

Installing PageSpeed yourself requires a bit of tech savviness, but it can be done.  On the other hand, you should always be able to ask your web host/developers to do the installation.

Some CMSs like WordPress, and also plugins, store data on your database, which in turn slows down your website over time.  Features in WordPress, such as enabling post revisions, pingbacks, and trackbacks rely heavily on your database for storage.  Also, be wary of plugins that save statistical and user data and logs.

To remedy this, regularly clean your database using automated plugins like WP-Optimize (for WordPress).  If you have any other platform, use this resource to clean up your database manually.  These measures are often overlooked by website owners, but they can have a tremendous impact on boosting your website speed.

Having multiple background images results in multiple requests to your server to load the images.  More requests result in a slower loading time.  You can fix this by combining the background images into just one file.  Utilize image sprites to ensure that browsers only have to make one request to load the background image.

Many website templates are comprised of several different background images.  When you combine them into one, you achieve three things.  First, you minimize the number of requests made to your server.  You also reduce the number of bytes the browser must download.  Lastly, you reduce roundtrip delays caused when your server has to download from other places.

Make your website faster by using SpriteMe.  This Smashing Magazine article makes good suggestions as well.

Typically, server file requests are completed on an individual basis.  A connection opens, the file is grabbed, the connection closes, and a new connection is opened for the next file grab.  This is inefficient, resulting in greater memory usage and a slower website loading time.

Use HTTP keep-alive to have all file requests made through one open connection.  The process is simple enough.  Just copy and paste the following code into the .htaccess file:

Header set Connection keep-alive

Depending on your server, you can also follow the steps here or here to enable keep-alive.

As the framework of your entire website, a CMS can affect the speed of your website.  Reputable CMSs such as WordPress and Drupal as well as simple HTML are perfectly suited to optimize your website loading time.  Less reputable CMSs put your website at risk for slower loading times.  It is vital that you run tests and do your homework to make sure your CMS is best for optimizing your website speed.

While PHP all but eliminates having to input the same information on your website over and over, it can also slow down your website.  You can do one of two things to remedy this: replace PHP files with static HTML files, or if you can’t do that, use a PHP accelerator.

PHP accelerators are useful for sites that have to rely heavily on PHP.  This Wikipedia article is helpful in listing a few good PHP accelerators that you can utilize.

When other websites hotlink to your own images, they are essentially ripping off your bandwidth.  Every time one of their visitors tries to view the images, a request is made to your server.  Disable hotlinking to prevent this from happening!

Follow the advice given in this article on Hongkiat to prevent hotlinking of your images.  Additionally, this tool allows you to generate a .htaccess file to prevent the hotlinking of your images.