In today's world, where everything changes very quickly, people are not used to waiting. The consumer is spoiled enough, because there is a fierce battle for his attention not only in offline business, but also online. Website speed is what a visitor encounters from the first minutes of interaction with your business, if your site does not correspond to the current reality, the client will simply go to competitors. In this article, we will give you guidelines on how to improve your site's performance and page load times.

1. Use lazy loading of content

The main idea behind lazy loading is to load images or frames only when users need to display them: they do not have to wait for all the elements on the page to load, so they can start using the web page earlier.

This means that on your pages only images in the user's view will be displayed, the rest of the images will be loaded as the page is viewed further.

2. Choose the best hosting for your website

For optimal site performance, you need to choose a reliable hosting. It is worth initially abandoning shared hosting and choosing between a VPS or a dedicated server.

VPS hosting combines some of the features of shared hosting with the aspects of dedicated hosting so that users have less competition for the shared resources of a single web server while still retaining more control over site management. This type of hosting can provide flexibility and is suitable for small or dynamic sites.

The most expensive hosting option is using a dedicated server, which can be your own physical server. In this case, you pay the rent of the server and hire a system administrator to maintain it. This type of hosting is suitable for large sites with a lot of traffic and data.

3. Use caching systems

Browser cache is temporary storage where browsers keep copies of static files so that they can load recently visited web pages much faster, instead of asking for the same content repeatedly. Developers can instruct browsers to cache web page elements that will not change frequently. Browser caching instructions go in the HTTP response headers from the host server. This greatly reduces the amount of data that the server must transmit to the browser, reducing load times for users who visit certain pages frequently.

4. Image optimization

Images make up a large percentage of internet traffic and often take the longest to upload to a website because image files tend to be larger than HTML and CSS files. Fortunately, image loading times can be shortened with image optimization. Image optimization usually involves downsampling, file compression, and file size reduction, and many image optimizers and image compressors are available for free on the internet.

5. Minify CSS and JavaScript files

Reducing code means removing everything the computer does not need to understand and execute the code, including code comments, spaces, and unnecessary semicolons. This makes the CSS and JavaScript files a little smaller, so they load faster in the browser. By itself, minimization will result in only minimal speed improvements. However, when implemented in conjunction with other tips, it will lead to better website performance.

6. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

CDNs improve the speed of websites by caching content in multiple locations around the world. CDN caching servers are usually located closer to end users than the host or origin server. Content requests go to the CDN server, not to the host server, which may be thousands of miles and multiple autonomous networks away from the user. Using a CDN can result in a significant reduction in page load times.

7. Don't use redirects (if possible)

A redirect is when visitors to one web page are redirected to another. Redirects add a few fractions of a second, and sometimes even whole seconds, to the page load time. When building a performance-optimized site, every second counts. Redirects are sometimes unavoidable but should not be used unless necessary.