In this Blog we will have in depth discussion about Optimizing Website’s Performance. So, what do we mean by website performace?

Web performance or website optimization simply means optimizing the speed of web elements (pages, images, other file formats etc.) which are downloaded or displayed on the user’s web browser.

Why Does Website Performance Optimization Matter?

Sure, this seems like a pretty obvious concept but have you really thought about why your website’s performance matters? Well here are five factors to consider:

User Satisfaction: It is a known fact that the user will move out to some other site if the user has to wait for some time. This is your site’s bouncing rate.

Bouncing rate is an important factor that every webmaster should take into account. Bounce rate is when the user visits your website and rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site, leaves to browse some other website.

This is considered as one of the most important measure of effectiveness for a website.

Increased website performance can reduce your costs. Most hosting facilities charge based on bandwidth and storage usage. Many performance practices will reduce your storage costs and significantly reduce your bandwidth usage.

This is considered as one of the most important measure of effectiveness for a website. Increased website performance can reduce your costs. Most hosting facilities charge based on bandwidth and storage usage. Many performance practices will reduce your storage costs and significantly reduce your bandwidth usage. Site performance has a direct effect on revenues. It is well known fact that site performance directly affects user abandonment rates.

Simply put, lesser the users that abandon sessions on your site, higher is your conversion rates and higher your revenue will be. This is especially important for ecommerce sites.

Simply put, lesser the users that abandon sessions on your site, higher is your conversion rates and higher your revenue will be. This is especially important for ecommerce sites. Mobile devices will soon out number desktop traffic. Every day more and more users are accessing web sites on mobile phones and tablets. Mobile devices will soon account for majority of all web traffic.

Mobile users are even more sensitive to poor page loading and will abandon the site much quicker than a desktop user. So if you ignore this segment of users, you will be left behind.

Having said that let’s look at ways to improve Website Speed.

Quick Tips to Improve Website Speed

Minimize HTTP Requests:

When a visitor enters your website, the corresponding files (CSS files, JavaScript library references, images etc.) must be sent to that person’s browser. As you can guess, every file you use in your design reduces your website’s performance.

So the best practice to reduce HTTP requests is to eliminate everything that’s unnecessary.

Enable Compression:

Large web pages are generally bigger than 100kb and this result in slower loading time. The best way to speed their load time is to use compression methods and “zip” them. Most web servers can compress files in Gzip format before sending them for download, either by calling a third-party module or using built-in routines. Most common compression methods are Deflate and Gzip.

Enable Browser Caching:

When a visitor enters your website for the first time, they have to download the HTML document, stylesheets, JavaScript files and images before being able to use your page. Once the page has been loaded, the files on the page are stored in a cache or temporary storage, so the next time visitor visits the site, browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server. Loading time reduces after first visit.

So, it is important to enable caching in order to enhance your web performance. You can set the cache lifetime to a minimum of one week and preferably up to one year in the future.

Reduce what you send to the browser:

Reducing the amount to data transferred to the browser should be your number one priority when it comes to reducing page load.

This can be accomplished by:

Compressing and optimizing images and serving scaled-to-size images. Remove any unused CSS or JavaScript and then minify your CSS and JavaScript. Enable a server side compression like GZip. Most modern browser supports this data compression, and it will significantly reduce the amount of data passed from the server to the client browser.

Optimize what you send to the browser:

Remove all JavaScript errors and 404 errors that occur on the page. These types of requests can cause long delays and often cause browsers to crashes.

Use efficient CSS selectors. A poor performing selector that has to search the entire DOM object can significantly slow down your load time.

Remove any unnecessary markup, avoid CSS expressions & imports and put your CSS declarations in the document header.

Look for opportunities to condense and combine CSS files and JavaScript files.

Defer parsing of JavaScript on page load, which is extremely helpful to mobile devices.

Now that you know the tricks to optimize your website’s performance let’s check some of the free tools that are available to test your website’s speed.

Free Tools to Test Your Website’s Speed

Listed below are 4 free tools to test your website’s speed:

1. Pingdom Tools

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Pingdom is a website monitoring service that offers free speed tests. Pingdom will display the load time of your web page and also provide you with a performance grade based on several important factors.

2. GTmetrix

http://gtmetrix.com

GTmetrix is a free tool that grades your website’s speed.

Not only does GTmetrix provide your page speed, it also analyzes around 30 different ways to improve your website’s speed and performance. You’ll even see your website’s YSlow grade.

3.WebPagetest

http://www.webpagetest.org

WebPagetest is a free online tool that displays the load time of your web page as well as 6 different performance grades.

If you click on “Page Speed” after running a test, you’ll find an overall grade as well as a checklist of some suggested changes (in order of importance) for increasing your website’s speed.

One cool feature of WebPagetest is the ability to select the country from which to run your test. This can be used to track how your speeds vary across the world.

4.Google PageSpeed

https://developers.google.com/

Google PageSpeed is a free tool that grades your website’s performance.

While PageSpeed won’t tell you the actual load time of a specific web page, it will analyze around 30 different ways to improve your website’s speed and performance.

5.Yellow Lab Tool

http://yellowlab.tools/

Its a Online test to help speeding up heavy web pages.Its Free and open source!

Conclusion:

Thus, we conclude that these days’ performance of a website really matters. It has become important to improve the performance rate of your sites. I hope this Blog was informative enough in this matter.

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