7 Ways to Improve Page Load Time

Whether you're a consumer or a business owner, your time is valuable. So when you click a website link and it buffers, that’s precious seconds you can’t afford to waste.

Even a one-second delay in page load time could result in up to 11% fewer page views and a 7% loss in conversions. In fact, around 40% of people will actually abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load. When you consider that most websites take around 2.5 seconds to boot up, the margin for error is tiny.

The worst news? A slow-loading website knocks points off your SEO ranking, meaning consumers are less likely to come across your site in the first place. But you don’t just have to accept your fate and sulk in the corner – here are 7 simple ways you can improve your website’s loading speed…

How to test page load speed

Before you go in with a hacksaw, it’s important to understand your site’s current load speed and bottlenecks. The best way to check its status is to conduct a page load test, which can be carried out with tools like:

With results in hand, you can make the following changes before running a second page load test to see how your results improve – then repeat as needed!

1. Optimise your images

Images and visuals are a great way to display information to your visitors, but they’re larger in space and size than plain text. There are a couple of ways to optimise them:

Scale appropriately: If the original image is 500x500 pixels, but you resize it with your CSS to display it as 250x250 pixels, the browser still downloads the image in its original size and loads the CSS. This means that the browser is loading an image four times the size of what it needs to be. Ensure that you resize your images using appropriate software – such as Photo & Picture Resizer and Adobe Express – before you integrate them into your website.
Format the file: JPEGs are considered the best image format, especially for photographs, while PNGs are suitable for graphics. BMPs should be avoided at all costs as they're widely regarded as an obsolete image format by modern standards.

2. Compress your pages

If your site is full of large, high-quality images or videos, then the page file size is going to be large too – slowing your load time massively. But just as you might compress files into ZIP folders for easy mailing, it’s possible to compress your webpages into smaller file sizes without any degradation to the quality of your images or videos.

Adding gzip compression can be done in a variety of ways depending on your web server and scripting language. Simply head to your server's settings.

3. Reduce your HTTP requests

If you’ve designed your website to include a lot of images, Flash scripts, and fancy transitions, then the browser that loads your page has to make requests for each of these components. Where possible, it’s best to avoid superfluous features that would affect average page load time.

To do this, make use of your CSS in place of background images, check how social integration affects your load times, and consider removing any non-essential JavaScript. When a browser tries to load non-asynchronous JavaScript, it prioritises it and won’t try to load anything else whilst it’s doing so. This dramatically affects your page load time and should be avoided altogether.

4. Keep your JavaScript below the fold

If you really want JavaScript files in your page, putting them below the fold allows the rest of the page to load first. Below the fold simply refers to the portion of the page a user will have to scroll to in order to see its contents.

For the best page load time, keep your image files and simple code above the fold and stick the JavaScript somewhere near the bottom of your page code. This lets the browser concentrate on the easy stuff first.

In other cases, you can make use of async or defer attributes in your JavaScript which, respectively, lets the rest of the page load in tandem with the JavaScript but only loads the script after the rest of the content has loaded.

5. Tighten up your code

When building your site, you may end up with bits of unnecessary code. They’re not doing any harm to how your page looks, but they’re also not doing any good. And when you consider that every line of code, tag, and script adds to the file size of your page, making sure that you’re only including the code that you absolutely need is vital to decreasing page load time.

There are many resources available online that will analyse your code for superfluous scripts or spaces, such as Fortify and Apify.

6. Enable browser caching

If you expect a lot of repeat visitors to your site, enabling browser caching allows the pages to be loaded without the browser having to individually download all the files again.

Instead, on the first visit to your site, the files are stored locally on the user’s computer temporarily. The next time they visit your page, the browser can just load the various files from the computer without having to request them from the server.

7. Host locally

Page load speed can be improved by hosting your website and storing your data in the same country as your users.

If you expect your customers to be UK-based, hosting your site on a web server in Gloucester, England means that the request has to ‘travel’ a shorter distance than if it was hosted in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Speaking of, did you know we offer free local website hosting for Gloucestershire-based businesses… just sayin’.

Quick load time + Fasthosts = winning website

These are just some of the ways that you can begin optimising your site’s load time. And remember, even if you only improve your website’s speed by a second, that could be the difference between a customer buying or bouncing.

So, you’ve conquered page speed. But why stop there? At Fasthosts, we offer a selection of expert cloud and dedicated server options on top of our web hosting services to help you get the most out of your website. Get in touch with one of our experts to find out more about how we can help your business.