If you feel the site loading speed test
honestly this isn't the best news for you
and you probably have a little work ahead of you
but don't worry I'll take you through a few
of your best tips and tricks to tag of this
mother of all questions
had you speed up your page load times
one of the most crucial indicators of your sites overall health
and it direct correlation with user experience
and search engines rankings
Now of course every website is different
one might be doing beautifully in some areas
but failing in others
well another website might just have simple
error that can be easily addressed
and at yet both suffers slow load times
so there's no one size that fits all answer for everybody here
but let's show you some of the most common issues
you might be having and how to addressed them
and for the record be sure and check out our channel with
dozen's of in depth videos on lot of these topics that will be covering here
now lets get to it
first of all its a very good idea to run your website
through our general auditing tool
To see where exactly some of your problems are
but for now lets just takel common issue one by one
now you probably already know this
but let me setup the scene here
to illustrate each of these issue for you
basically it works like this
your website is a collection of files
HTML code
java script files
Cascading Style Sheets, images and so on
you've got all of these stored on the server you're paying monthly fee too
doesn't really matter where's the server is
but just to illustrate lets say that its in LA
now some dude in newyork wants to check out your site
he types in your url into his browser
and all is doing here is sending a request
to your server asking for all of the relevant content
that makes your site
then the server compliance and send him everything he needs
dude collects all in his end
and then a team of files gets together the A team and renders on his browser
now before we get into the size of these files
which of course affects how quickly all of these content
can be send through whatever bandwidth restrictions
your server and the end user have
one issue you can look into is the
number of HTTP request
to take and send all of these content
and doing whatever you can't minimize those
i mean of course you don't really have to know the exact
count of http request it takes
nor is there any magic number you should try to aim for
but you should be aware that page load time
is basically boiled down to
yes the amount of data being sent over the network
but also the number of request it takes
how many round trips between the end user asking for files
and your server sending them
for instance lets say you have four java script files
all coming to a grand total of 148 kilo bytes
but since there independent files
it takes four http request for the user to get them
but if you combine them into one large javascript file
fine it's still 148 kilo bytes so no savings there
But now it takes just one http request to fetch up from the server
and not affects page load time
and here look at that a video on our channel that covers all of these in depth
but its just not about combining files
in facts there are plenty of cases we don't wanna do this
like in my case my site uses nineteen javascript files
but not all of them are used on every single page
some are only needed on certain pages that don't get much traffic
so in my case combining them or concatenating them
will actually these super counter productive
forcing the end user to often download
a lot of java script they don't actually need
so in my case I'm best of combining these particular seven of them
combining these three CSS files
using image sprites
instead of background image and instead of my menu buttons
using data urls instead of images
you can Employee all sorts of techniques to reduce number of overall http request
In my case I've started with 34 http requests
and through this method I have reduced it to just 12 request
same website no changes to the end user whats so ever
but by reducing these http request
it now takes my fellow just 3.2 seconds to load my sites
instead of the original 7.1 seconds
and that's a wapping difference
so feel free to explore this issue and check out
our video on channel that goes much depper into this topic
now lets move on to Gzip compression
and again you guessed it we've got a great video
on our channel that goes into all that indepth as well
essentially Gzip compression
uses an algorithm that looks for similar text strings in your source code
and replaces them with shorter strings
this result in less code and therefore smaller file size
so my dude in newyork asked for the content
and instead of sending him the 2742 mega bytes
worth of files he needs to render my site on his browser
its sends him the much smaller 808 mega byte g zip compressed version
dude gets it Gzip uncompressed on his side and boom
same site
same content
only he got all of that content a hack of a lot faster
and the best part is the Gzip compression is super super easy to implement
Just a couple of lines added to your HT access files
or simple plugin if you're using wordpress
easy- pesy
next another list of magic tricks is HTTP caching
generally handled by a directive within your HT access file
This defines how much time a file
or certain file types are cached into the end user machine
Bob visits your site
thereby downloading all of the content it takes to render your site
and stores lets say 90% of it
All the CSS the javascript images and other elements
then next time he visits your site
his browser only need to request 10% of the content
and loads up the 90 % it already stored
much faster obviously
but this caching not only take place on Bobs computer
it can also take place on any intermediate proxy and cache along a way
like if your content is being delivered by
lets say six servers and a content delivering network
i won't get deep into the needs of it here
you have a lot of control over what content of yours is cached
certain file types everything
you can make some caching public on intermediate proxies
or private where they cached only on the end user computer
you can set cache expiration dates
So users on repeat visits to our sites
don't need to re download certain content
until after certain amount of time is passed
you have all kinds of control here
so be sure to check out our video on that one too
now lets move on to some more optimization techniques
For both CSS and javascript files
we have a few videos that covers these topics
but let me give you the highlights here
basically although
note that there are some exceptions its not a hard and fast rule
but often enough its a good idea to concatenate
or combine your CSS files
into a single file
then minify that code
and same goes for your javascript files
that one exception to this is
for instance if you have any CSS or javascript
designed for specific devices
like you have got one CSS style layout for desktop devices
and it different CSS layout for tablets and mobile devices
in that case you don't want to combine all the style into a single sheet
therefore forcing a mobile user
to download all that desktop CSS
well its not necessary and it don't need it
but generally speaking its a concept worth looking into
specially if you have multiple css or javascript files that could be concatenated
again we have several videos that covers these topics more thoroughly
but the basic idea is
instead of end user downloading my four CSS file
and my nineteen javascript files to render my site
In my case it makes much more sense to concatenate these
then minify them
not only reducing overall file size
but in this case the end user then only needs to download
one CSS file and one javascript file
thus reducing the needed bandwidth
as well as reducing the number of HTTP request needed to get them
this can make a big difference in page load time
and on that note in terms of pointing 20 CSS
or javascript files in my html code
its best practice to refer to your CSS first
and to refer to your javascript files at the bottom of your page
now of course when building your site one of your first
order of business should be to optimize the images on your site
especially for larger website or for portfolios with lots of images
not having these optimized is a sureify way to really slow down your page load times
why have these beautiful 12000 x 12000 pixel background image
that's 45 mega bytes and takes user 33 seconds to download
when you can optimized the image
in this case lets reduced to a standard 4K size
3840 x 3840 pixels
no difference to the eye whatsoever
but now its only 2 mega bytes
and takes the user 0.9 seconds to download
so be sure and look into optimizing your images
can you reduced the image size without sacrificing quality
may be a format conversion from .png to .jpg will make a huge difference
or you can harness the power of image sprites
for certain things like icons or menu items
which can also reduced the number of http request
needed to fetch the content
and of course be sure the your images being cached when possible
all of these goes a long long way in reducing page load times
and if you employed redirect in your source code
like canonicalizing your URLs
which we cover in depth in our channel here
so the users that typing WWW are
automatically redirected to the code n code real webpage
https
or if you're using 301 redirects
to keeps search engines from indexing certain pages
or sending users to a different page then the one they typed it
redirects can be very useful
but just make sure you're not using too many
or any unnecessary ones
so be sure to have a closer look at them
to make sure you truly need to have them
or look into atleast shortening them
so the your visitors have less hoops to jumps
through it to get to the content they are looking for
all of these has an impact on page load time
and lastly specially if you're using wordpress
or other content management systems
be sure to disabled any plugin that you're not actually using
and make sure that are always up to date and running on the latest versions
a goofy or broken plugin might weak have an page load times
and there you go
As I said every website is different
so what works for someone else might not work for you
but this video has covers some of the common issue people have
when they are suffering for slow page load time
feel free to check out our other videos
so you can keep fine-tuning and getting the most out of your SEO
and click subscribe to stay updated with
new tips and tricks to get you to the top of the search engine results pages