How can you decrease the loading time of a website and make it fast? Nobody likes a slow website. Even Google uses website speed to determine a website’s position in the SERPs. So how do you optimize your site for speed? Check out the following tips.
Crunch your CSS
You can use an online tool like this one to optimize and compress your CSS code. This will reduce your loading time a little.
Combine and compress your JavaScripts.
You can use another online tool like https://www.jch-optimize.net/documentation/minify-css-and-javascript.html to compress your JavaScripts.
Defer the loading of some JavaScript
You can delay the loading of heavy JavaScript by putting it in the footer of the page instead of the head.
Optimize your images
Compress your images and make sure that their dimensions match their containers. Instead of resizing images using CSS, make sure that you are using images of the right size.
Use a fast web server
You can use a fast web server such as LiteSpeed or in some cases nGinx or something else specific to your application. You can also use a caching software such as Varnish, or a combination of Apache > Varnish > Nginx for maximum speed.
Use a CDN such as Cloudflare
Cloudflare does all of this for you. It optimizes your HTML, compresses your CSS and JavaScript, and optimizes your images. It’s very fast and saves you a ton of headaches. It will also cache your website’s content across the world, so visitors from different countries will still receive a fast website.
How can you decrease the loading time of a website and make it fast if you are using WordPress?
If you are using WordPress, there are plugins such as WP-Optimize, Webp Express, Smush Pro, or LiteSpeed cache that do all of the hard work for you for free. You can still combine them with Cloudflare for maximum speed because why not.
In the meantime, check out my other post Is WordPress worth learning in 2023?
Post your experience with website optimization in the comments below.
Aleksandar Paunovski is a Computer Science student at New Bulgarian University. He has more than 20 years of experience with computer systems. Aleksandar knows PHP, JavaScript, C++, CSS, and HTML and is an expert on WordPress, computer security, Linux, Mac OS, Chrome OS, and Windows. When not busy making sites, Aleksandar loves to listen to 90’s music, walk in the park, and post on his blog.