Your website’s loading speed can have an enormous effect on its business. A slow website could turn away potential customers and damage its reputation.
Page load time refers to the amount of time it takes a website or link to fully display on a user’s screen when they visit or click it, and influences search engine rankings, user experience and conversion rates.
- Optimize Your Images
Websites that load quickly are essential for user experience, SEO rankings, and overall success. Unfortunately, image-heavy sites tend to load slower due to images taking significantly more time to download than text or code.
In order to speed up your images, it’s best to optimize them before uploading them online. This may mean cropping or resizing them so as to reduce file sizes without impacting quality, or using compression tools that help decrease their file sizes while increasing page speeds.
Choose an image format suitable for its purpose – JPEG works best for photographs while PNG excels with logos and icons. Make sure your files use descriptive names, add alt tags for people with disabilities to read them more easily, and implement lazy loading; this way users will only see full-image loads when needed instead of waiting until page load to view all of them at once.
- Optimize Your CSS
Average load times have an enormous influence on everything from search engine rankings, mobile optimization and customer satisfaction – up to 75% of visitors won’t come back if a site takes longer than four seconds to load!
One simple way you can boost CSS performance is through compression (using Gzip or similar software applications) of stylesheet files to reduce their file sizes and aid browser caching, an integral element of page load speeds.
Reduce the number of lines and characters in your CSS by eliminating unnecessary white space and comments, while making use of class selectors instead of nested tags to make browser parsing simpler. Also ensure you have an efficient system in place for managing and optimizing CSS files – either splitting them up into separate files, or embedding them directly into HTML/JavaScript via lazy loading/embedding techniques.
- Optimize Your PHP
Website speed is one of the key components in user experience, SEO and conversion rates. Visitors are more likely to stay on your site if it loads quickly, increasing chances that they make purchases or sign up for newsletters.
Fast website loading times make it easier for search engines to index your pages, making optimization of PHP key to faster website load times and therefore essential.
There are various strategies available to you when it comes to improving PHP performance, including inlining CSS and JavaScript files, reducing HTTP requests, compressing images, using a content delivery network and more. A profiling tool should also be utilized during development to detect bottlenecks and implement best practices as necessary. Keeping PHP code optimized for speed will improve user experience as well as reduce costs by decreasing server loads over time.
- Optimize Your Server
Over 75% of Visitors Will Leave Website Pages That Take More Than Four Seconds to Load
A slow website may put visitors off, leading them to abandon your website entirely. A faster site on the other hand is more likely to draw them in and improve customer experiences as well as sales.
Server speed directly impacts how quickly your website loads for visitors, as this is what delivers its contents to their browsers. Furthermore, server response times may also depend on factors like network connections, plugins/widgets installed and image file sizes.
For optimal server-side load time, it is critical that various aspects of your website are optimized, including image sizes, compressing files, optimizing CSS, caching and third-party integrations and services (limiting can also help improve performance) plus lazy-load or icon font implementation to decrease bandwidth usage and HTTP requests.