Website speed optimisation is the practice of improving the time it takes a website to load. It is extremely important as it’s a factor Google considers when ranking websites, it’s also imperative for the retention of your online visitors. If a website takes too long to load, your visitors will become frustrated and leave your website to look elsewhere.
There are many practices we take to ensure are websites runs as fast as possible and in accordance with Googles website speed test. These practices include:
Optimise images
The resolution of an image can have a great impact of the time it takes a website to load. High resolution image can be more than 10 megabits which will take a significantly longer time to load then web-optimised images which are around 120 kilobytes. We optimise all the images on our website, it can be a time-consuming process, especially if a website has a lot of images, however it will have a great impact on the websites performance.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code
CSS, JavaScript and HTML are the computer code used to build websites. By optimising the code (including removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters), you can dramatically increase a website speed. We ensure all our code is minified to ensure the load times are fastest as possible.
Leverage browser caching
Your web browser stores information about the websites you visit to help them load faster the next time your visit that page. This is known as browser caching, “Leveraging” browser caching on the other hand is when a websites code instructs a browsers how the data from the website should be stored. Leveraging browser caching will improve the load speed for return visitors to your website which will improve the user experience.
Use a content distribution network
Content distribution networks (CDN’s) are networks of servers that are used to distribute the load of a websites deliverable content. Basically, duplicates of your website are stored at various, geographically diverse data centers so that users have quicker and more reliable access to your site.
Other Speed Optimisation Factors
In addition to the above-mentioned speed optimisation practices there are other efforts that can be employed to improve a websites load speed. These include the limitation of website directs, the reduction of server response time and enabling website compression.
