Launching a new website for your business? That’s great, but the competition is tighter than ever. Right now, there are well over 1.7 billion websites live.
With so much saturation, you might find it challenging to stand out, especially when you’re aspiring to be at the top of the search engine results page. With little technical experience, it seems like an impossible task. Yet you need not feel discouraged.
In this guide, you’ll learn various website techniques to ensure your site is fast and accessible. Read on and find out more.
1. Don’t Skimp on Your Web Host.
Google is a search engine titan, with over 91% of the global market share for search. That’s why when you want people to see your website, it’s beneficial to follow Google’s guidelines. This means your site must be fast enough to rank high on the results page.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to look at your web hosting provider. Don’t hesitate to invest more and upgrade from the cheap shared hosting service many sites use. This traditional method of hosting makes websites share resources on a physical server.
An excellent upgrade is to invest in cloud hosting. Its main draw is the fact that it offers virtually limitless resources for your website. Also, this service provides you with more control over your server customization and software you can install.
2. Prioritize Caching
There are different types of caching, but they follow the same principle despite working differently in action. To improve your website caching, knowing these types is a must. Here are the most common ones:
Browser Cache
This type of caching, also known as website caching, is at the user level. The browser keeps the larger, more static files to make it easier to load when users visit a website—most of the time, browsers cache CSS, scripts, and images. This makes website access faster since the client/browser won’t request the every time the user visits your site.
Server Cache
Like browser cache, server cache works using the same principle but on a server level. You can empty your webserver cache in WordPress using tools like Cloudflare or Breeze.
Distributed Cache (CDN)
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, a group of servers distributed geographically. These coordinate to ensure fast online content delivery. These servers are global, sharing a website’s static files like images, videos, JavaScript, or CSS.
That way, they can deliver the content using the server closest to a visitor’s current geographic location. For example, when a user plays a video, it loads quickly since the nearest server is automatically used. For your website to become faster, use CDNs like Amazon CloudFront.
3. Configure the “Expires Headers”
All cache types have expiration dates in their file headers. This determines the storage duration of these files on both the servers and the visitors’ computers. Its default value is zero seconds, meaning everything will expire without delay.
If you want your users to have a faster website experience, tweak the “expires header” on some website elements. Your priority includes static files like images, so set the expiration date as high as you desire. For more dynamic data getting regular updates, the immediate expiration is fine as is.
4. Use Important Plugins
Plugins will make your website easier to handle. But if you’re using a lot of plugins, your website will take longer to load since each one will take some time. Also, older plugins tend to hog more resources, making your website even slower.
One of the best website techniques is to remove unnecessary plugins from your website. Get rid of ones with unknown functions since they’re likely unimportant to your site operation. Always check whether your current plugins have newer versions available.
Also, consider the fact that most outdated WordPress plugins are vulnerable. Replacing these plugins with newer, more efficient ones will increase your site speed while maintaining security.
5. Finetune Your Images
To increase traffic you’ll need a scalable website.
Remember that a website’s page weight depends on images since they account for about 61% of a page’s content. That’s why the sizes of your images can have a large effect your site speed. With larger photos, your website will get bogged down, making the visitor experience less than ideal.
To speed up your site, start by getting rid of unnecessary images. For those you want to keep, reduce the file size. A viable method is to lower the image resolution to the standard web resolution size, 72 DPI.
Another simple method is to compress the picture. You can also crop the image and retain only the necessary areas. Use server caching too since this allows your website to show images automatically.
6. Combine CSS Sprites with Images
If a web page has several images, you’re making the server work more to get everything. As a result, your website becomes slower. That’s why image sprites are essential since they enable you to overcome this problem.
An image sprite combines all background images of a web page into one. It means all images will show up as soon as the main “sprite” loads. This will decrease the number of flickering images and enable a smoother user experience.
The best place to start is WordPress since it has plugins suited for this function. If you aren’t sure how to do this alone, ask a web development company for assistance. Ensure that they also specialize in WordPress development.
Lastly, compress all other content on your website. The best solution is to group CSS files and JavaScript files.
Use these Website Techniques Today!
These are website techniques you should apply if you want to make your website faster. They’re simple enough for beginners, so don’t hesitate to try them as soon as possible.
Do you need development help to increase the speed of your website? If so, contact us today to get professional web design and development services.
