The most frustrating thing for the user is to wait for the website to load. When I heard that in the late 2009 Google will take into account the loading of the website and penalize those websites which are slower. It was a big step to make the internet faster and easy to navigate. The web should be fast, and it should snap and respond quickly to any query. If you are worried about slow loading, you can consider these things to get started.
1. Using Flash
Use of flash on websites is very cool, you can do lot of amazing things with flash and I personally like flash websites, but when you are using flash on your website it will take sometime to load. It is possible to build a website without a flash, but if you do not want to remove flash, then you need to use it in excess. You can enhance the user experience with flash rather than covering whole website in flash. It will help your website to work faster, and you can also compress the files to load faster.
There is another frustrating thing when a visitor visits a flash website, and they cannot load the flash website because they do not have the latest version of the flash player. Provide a link to upgrading the flash player, so that they can easily navigate through your website.
2. Using Images
Images are the important to attract the attention of the visitors on your website, but sometimes some of the images take a lot of time to load. You can overcome this problem by compressing the image files. I had a problem while I was reducing the size of the images, their quality decreased while reducing the size. You can use any good image software or any online service to resize your image to your needs.
Always try not to reduce the quality of images because quality of images is the important thing to consider. Compressing the images will help you to load your website faster, and it will increase the user experience as well.
3. Using Java Scripts
Java scripts are mainly used to load advertisements such as Google Adsense or any other third party java script code. You need to avoid the java scripts as much as possible, but it is the necessity as well. You can compress your java code to make it load even faster; the best tip to compress the java script code is to look for online java compression website. It will help your website to load faster.
You can also use the third party java scripts after compression, but when there is some problem with the java script provided by the third party it might affect your website to load slower.
4. Use Less Widgets
Using the widgets on your website and blog is great; you can easily put many things through the widgets. When I started blogging, I put too many widgets to make my blog look more attractive, but the loading time was significantly increased and at that time I couldn’t figure out the problem. Later on, I found it was due to too many widgets on the blog. It might take a lot of time for the users with slow connection and after reducing the widgets speed was increased.
When you are using the widgets on your website you need to consider following:
How many widgets do I need?
How many widgets I am using?
Which ones are necessary?
It will help you out to get rid of extra widgets on your website, and it will increase the speed of your website.
5. Using Redirects
Using the 301 redirects are considered to be SEO friendly and you can use it on your old domains or paths which you have moved to a new location. I have noticed while using the redirects that when you set up a redirect on your website, it loads the old address first then to new address. This will slow down the speed of your website if you are using too many redirects.
Try avoiding the extra redirects, you can use the 301 permanent redirects on your old domains, but avoid using them on other pages over and over. This will increase the speed of the website.
6. Choosing Web Host
You might be thinking how would a web host going to affect the speed of the website? If you take an example of a web host with slower server and extra load, it will affect your website to load slower. You need to be very careful while choosing a web hosting company. Ask a lot of questions before choosing a web host if you do not have a hosting experience in the past. Ask them about their server specifications and make sure they don’t oversell. If their servers are fast, then your website will also load faster as well.
7. Using Cookies
Try to use fewer cookies on your website, you might have seen some of the websites, which require having cookies enabled to load the website. It will slow down the speed for the users; do not put too many cookies on your website. Same rule applies when you are using a flash website.
Conclusion
These are few simple tips to help you make your website faster for the users. It will help you to speed up your website. If you want to add anything or have any suggestions add through the comments.
