Top 10 Tips for Decreasing Web Page Load Time

Waiting always sucks. People are so desperate these days that they can’t wait even a bit for anything. Have you tested your site’s web page load time? It might be the case with your website also. The visitors/ audience prefer sites that load instantly. Consider yourself, if you are opening any site and it takes too much time to load. What do you? Obviously, you also prefer to close that web page and try alternative result web page URL displayed to you based on your search queries. There are thousands of search results displayed for every search queries. Hence, it is necessary that your blog should have less web page load time.If your web page is responding slow no one will have enough patience to wait for it. It is high time to take it seriously to speed up your website and decrease web page load time. The visitors never come back to your site and it also affects our ranking in search engines. As Google has already announced that they are now including website speed in their search ranking algorithms.

• Pingdom offers an easy-to-use site speed test that mimics that way a page is loaded in a web browser. It is one of the best page speed tools.
• Page Speed is an open-source Firefox add-on that helps you assess the performance of your web pages. It also provides suggestions on how to fix performance issues.
• Web Page Test is another great tool that shows you the speed and performance of your website in different browsers.

You can also read this article Top 5 Tools To Check Website Speed to test your website speed and to find website load time.

Having a fast website is extremely crucial for staying alive in the modern era of web design. There is simply no room for slow websites anymore.

The following are some tips for decreasing web page load time

1) Use Static Text Wherever You Can

This is the most important thing that you can do to decrease web page load time. Let me explain it a bit. Most bloggers use online available themes. These themes are designed to fulfill the purpose of the dynamic website that can use for any website. Hence for displaying site title, meta type, author information, footer it makes unnecessary calls of PHP functions to fetch the information filled in the WordPress Dashboard theme section.

Though it is easy for novice bloggers to fill information about their website using a menu-driven interface. But we can decrease web page load time to make it static. You can make Headers and Footers as much static as you can. As for every page of your website same Headers and footers will be displayed.

Sample code is :<?<span class=”hiddenSpellError” pre=”” data-mce-bogus=”1″>php</span> wp_title( ‘|’, true, ‘right’ ); ?>

            php bloginfo(‘html_type’); ?>; charset=” />

You can replace the above sample code as:

<title> CatchUpdates.com </title>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″/>

You can open your theme code to check whatever information you can make static thus avoiding unnecessary calls.

2) Minimize HTTP Requests

Most of the page-loading time is spent downloading components of that page. The components can be described as images, CSS Files, and JavaScript/JS files. If we can minimize the number of requests a web page makes, it will load faster. If you have multiple stylesheets and JavaScript libraries, consider combining them to reduce the number of HTTP requests. So it is advisable to use CSS instead of images and combine multiple style sheets into one. You should try reducing the number of scripts and putting them at the bottom of the page.

3) Optimize Your Images

Images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a page. As a result, optimizing images can often yield some of the largest byte savings and performance improvements: the fewer bytes the browser has to download, the less competition there is for the client’s bandwidth and the faster the browser can download and render content on the screen. You can use Plugins to automatically compress the images. One of such Plugin is Smush.it.

4) Utilize Browser Caching

Browser caching stores cached versions of static resources. This speeds up page speed tremendously and reduces server lag. To enable caching, you will want to add the following code to your .htaccess file:

# BEGIN Expire headers

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresDefault”access plus 1 seconds”

ExpiresByType image/jpeg”access plus 2592000 seconds”

ExpiresByType image/png”access plus 2592000 seconds”

ExpiresByType image/gif”access plus 2592000 seconds”

ExpiresByType text/CSS”access plus 604800 seconds”

ExpiresByType text/javascript”access plus 604800 seconds”

ExpiresByType application/javascript”access plus 604800 seconds”

ExpiresByType text/html”access plus 2592000 seconds”

# END Expire headers

If you need to understand .htaccess file and its features, you may love to read this article  –

What is .htaccess File ? How To Secure Your Blog With It

5) Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can all be “minified” or compressed to speed up their loading time. There are a number of resources on the web that minifies these types of files.

6) Reduce 301 Redirects

Every time a 301 redirect is used, it forces the browser to a new URL which increases page-loading times. If possible, avoid using 301 redirects.

7) Avoid Using a large number of Plugins

Though there is no specific limit on how much Plugins should we use? But it is always recommended to use an optimum number of Plugins. For example, Most Bloggers tend to use Facebook Plugin to showcase their Facebook page. But this same thing can be done by pasting ready-made code only. This code you can get from developer page on Facebook itself. Try replacing plugins with the code itself to decrease web page load time thus speeding up rendering your web page.

8) Enable compression

Large pages are often bulky and thus are slow to download. The best way to decrease web page load time is to compress them wherever possible. Compression reduces the bandwidth of your pages, thus reduces HTTP response.

Also Read: WP Rocket Review  – Best WordPress Caching Plugin 

9) Choose above-the-fold content wisely

You should always choose your above the fold content wisely. If you are adding any script in your header and it is fetching some information from other site/URL then it will definitely slow down your site speed. You can improve user experience by having your above-the-fold load faster even if the rest of the page takes a few seconds to load.

10) Use a good coded & Clean designed theme

You should be using a clean designed and responsive theme. One of the reasons I switched my blog to Genesis Framework is it is cleanly designed and speed optimized theme.

As per the survey of default child theme of Genesis Framework, web page load time is as below:

• Pingdom – performance grade 96/100, load time – 1.11 seconds, page size 491.5kb, 10 requests
• GTMetrix – page speed grade 56%, YSlow Grade – 96%, page load time 0.92 seconds

Also Read: 10 Reasons Why You Should Purchase Genesis Framework

• Best Premium Genesis Child Themes

Do share your views and what strategies you are using to decrease web page load time 🙂