Pro Tips to Make Your Website Load Faster and Attract More Users

Introduction

As a website owner, you're probably familiar with the frustration that comes from watching your page load slowly. Slow-loading websites can frustrate your users and make them bounce, leading to lower conversion rates at best and lost sales at worst. But if you're not a developer or don't have access to one, it can be difficult to know where exactly to start when trying to speed up your site. We've compiled some expert tips for making your website load faster so that you can put these ideas into action right away.

1. Reduce the number of plugins you use

While plugins can be useful, they can also slow down your website.

If you don’t need a plugin, don't install it! Typically, plugins are only necessary if you want to add features like:

• Contact forms

• User registration/login

• Analytics tracking and reporting

2. Compress and Optimize images

Another thing you can do to make your website more responsive is compress and optimize images. Compressing images will reduce the size of your files, which makes them load faster. The most popular image compression tool is TinyPNG. There are also many other tools like Imagify, ShortPixel, Smush.it and WP Smush that can help with this task.

Compared with PNG file, we highly recommend you using webp files which is smaller in size. If you have lots of png files staying on the site, use Anywebp to convert png to webp without hesitation!

3. Optimize and trim your code

Code optimization is another part of the page load process that can make a huge difference. The goal here is to trim unnecessary code from your web pages and remove any whitespace, which will make them load faster. This can be achieved by using a minifier, which will compress your CSS stylesheets and JavaScript files into smaller versions that are easier for the browser to render. Minifying your CSS will help reduce file sizes by removing unnecessary white space characters like spaces and tabs between selectors.

The same goes for JavaScript files—use shorthand notation instead of full words (for example, use var instead of var $) or functions (such as alert rather than window.alert()). This reduces overall file size but still conveys meaning so it doesn't affect how a user's browser renders your website's content after loading all its assets into memory!

4. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) is a service that allows you to host your website on content servers close to your users. That way, when someone visits your site, they don't have to wait for the files to travel over long distances—instead, it's already waiting for them closer to home.

There are two main ways in which CDNs can speed up page load times:

• Content Delivery Network (CDN): A network of distributed servers that deliver web pages and other web assets to users with minimum delay. A CDN uses multiple server locations so that visitors will receive files from their local server if possible. This reduces latency and increases performance for end users accessing websites and applications over wide area networks such as the Internet or private networks such as organizations' intranets/extranets..

5. Leverage browser caching

You know how your web browser stores a copy of the websites you visit, so that the next time you open it up, it loads faster? This is called browser caching. Leveraging browser caching makes your site load faster for users and helps them to stay on your site longer.

How does it work? When a user visits a website, their computer downloads all of the content from that website (images, style sheets, JavaScript files). That content gets stored locally on their computer in an area called the cache. The next time they visit that same website again (or any other site using similar content), instead of downloading everything again from scratch, the browser simply looks for previously downloaded information in its cache and uses this instead of re-downloading everything again. How long should you allow people's browsers to hold onto cached versions of things like JavaScript or images? It depends on what kind if page are being loaded:

6. Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML

Minifying CSS, JavaScript and HTML is a way to remove unnecessary characters from code. It can help make websites load faster and have less impact on performance. If you're not already minifying your CSS, JavaScript and HTML, here are some reasons why it's important:

• Minification makes sites more secure by reducing the number of opportunities for hackers to find an attack vector. When files aren't minified or obfuscated (more on this below), hackers can scan through them looking for vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit—like known vulnerabilities in commonly used libraries like jQuery or Bootstrap. If they find one, they'll use it to attack your site at scale, which could result in widespread damage across the internet! But if those libraries are minified beforehand then such attacks are more difficult because all hackers would have access is a bunch of gibberish code instead of real-world exploits found within those files themselves.

• Minification also helps speed up page loads by reducing file sizes while leaving functionality intact (which means users will still be able to interact with elements like buttons). This makes sense intuitively: after all, who wants their website loading slowly?

7. Minimize HTTP requests

One thing you can do to reduce the number of HTTP requests your site makes is combine resources. When you combine resources, you’re actually merging different source files into one file (or at least less files). You can do this with CSS and JavaScript files, but it also works with images.

Combining resources is a good way to reduce HTTP requests because each resource loads separately when it’s requested on a page. If there are too many separate resources loading, then it takes longer for your website to load in a user’s browser. By combining these assets into fewer files, you can decrease the number of HTTP requests and make your website faster overall.

8. Enable Gzip compression

Gzip is a file format that compresses files to make them smaller. It's used by most browsers and can be applied to HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other types of files. In fact, it's so ubiquitous that you may have seen it mentioned in your browser's developer console when you've visited a site before.

Gzip compression can reduce the size of your website assets (HTML/CSS/JavaScript/images) by up to 70%, which means less data has to be downloaded across the internet!

Conclusion

The bottom line is that the more people who visit your website, the more chance you have to convert them into customers or clients. And if you’re doing it right and investing time in keeping up with all these new trends and technologies, then your website will be able to stand out from the crowd.