This will reduce file sizes and therefore load times. You can do this manually or use a minification tool. The longer it takes your domain name server DNS to respond, the longer your time to first byte TTFB and the slower your site loads.

Free online tools can determine where your DNS provider ranks compared to other offerings, which in turn helps pinpoint specific performance issues. Worth noting? In some cases, your hosting provider will also supply DNS services, while in others these two functions are separate. The good news is many CMS platforms provide built-in features or plugins to enable asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript elements, which allows them to load simultaneously.

To maximize page loading speed, use the fewest number of fonts possible, and focus on fonts that are optimized for speed. For example, in a study of the top 10 Google Fonts by KeyCDN , Open Sans had the lowest load time at 0. Last but not least: identify performance-sapping plugins also called add-ons or extensions.

Here, the speed rule is simple: Only keep the plugins you need and always deploy the latest, fastest versions. This is particularly important if you run a WordPress website. For more advanced methods to optimize your WordPress website speed using Google PageSpeed Insights specifically, check out this video by Jack Cao:.

To speed up load times for return visitors, you can add expires headers to the. htaccess file of your site. This type of HTTP header indicates how long until cached copies of site resources expire so the browser knows whether to serve site resources from the cache or request them from the server.

Expires headers are important for two reasons. They let your browser serve up-to-date resources from the cache, which reduces server load and load time — and they prohibit your browser from serving outdated resources to visitors, which could have hurt the user experience.

If your site is on WordPress, check out our guide 2 Ways to Add Expires Headers in WordPress to complete this step. The faster your website loads, displays content, and responds to user input, the lower your bounce rates and the higher your conversions.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in November and has been updated for comprehensiveness. Speed Up Your Website with HubSpot's Built-In CDN. CMS Hub is flexible for marketers, powerful for developers, and gives customers a personalized, secure experience. Anna Fitzgerald.

Updated: May 11, Published: July 19, Topics: Website Performance. Don't forget to share this post! Lazy Loading: How It Decreases Load Time and Increases Engagement. How to Test Your Website Speed. How to Resize an Image without Losing Quality.

Top Website Optimization Tips, from SEOs Driving Millions of Views Per Month. What are AI Content Writing Tools? And Should You Use One? Hotlink protection Hotlink protection refers to restricting HTTP referrers in order to prevent others from embedding your assets on other websites.

Hotlink protection will save you bandwidth by prohibiting other sites from displaying your images. Infrastructure Having a fast web host is equally as important as any website performance optimization you could make, as it is the backbone of your site. Stay away from cheap shared hosting.

Depending upon the platform you are running errors can be quite taxing on your server. Database Optimization And last but not least is database optimization. Whether it is cleaning out old unused tables or creating indexes for faster access there are always things that can be optimized.

If you feel like you need help with WPO, feel free to contact Seocom , they are experts in SEO and web performance optimization techniques! If you need tech help with WPO, contact Apiumhub , we will be happy to help you!

Ekaterina Novoseltseva is an experienced CMO and Board Director. Professor in prestigious Business Schools in Barcelona.

Teaching about digital business design. Right now Ekaterina is a CMO at Apiumhub - software development hub based in Barcelona and organiser of Global Software Architecture Summit. Ekaterina is proud of having done software projects for companies like Tous, Inditex, Mango, Etnia, Adidas and many others.

Ekaterina was taking active part in the Apiumhub office opening in Paseo de Gracia and in helping companies like Bitpanda open their tech hubs in Barcelona. View all posts. May 16, October 7, December 24, This blog has really helped me in transforming my website from slow and unresponsive to speedy and very responsive.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Software Deployment Best Practices. Interview with Annie Freeman, Green Software Expert.

Green Software Podcasts and YouTube Channels. Web Performance Optimization Techniques. Ekaterina Novoseltseva October 11, Agile web and app development software development tools.

Share This Post. Table of Contents Toggle Web Performance Optimization overview 16 Web performance optimization techniques Key tools for web performance optimization If you found this article with web performance optimization techniques interesting, you might like… Author.

Ekaterina Novoseltseva. More to Explore Backend helps to improve User Experience Why You Should Consider Using React Router v6 Remix vs Next. js which one should you use? js 14 and How Does It Achieve to… Server-Side Web Pages With Kotlin pt. Even with dedicated smartphone-optimized pages, mobile users are not always redirected to the intended mobile-versions of desktop website pages requested from mobile browsers.

Redirects are instructions that send users seeking one website URL to another one that supposedly contains the exact information requested by users. Redirects are most effective for mobile users searching for desktop versions of website pages that must be mapped well to equivalent mobile versions in delivering the best mobile website experience.

Doing so inaccurately keeps users from switching between unwanted website files until they reach the right one. This causes unnecessary delays in loading the information actually sought by end-users. Website owners are eventually responsible for losing competitive advantages in the mobile space when the mobile web traffic is simply redirected toward irrelevant desktop website version, instead of delivering a speed-optimized mobile solution for mobile visitors.

Websites not speed-optimized for mobile devices suffer from common issues hampering mobile user experience. Issues such as faulty redirects, unplayable videos, bloated images and graphics, irrelevant cross-linking and unnecessary assets delivered to mobile visitors degrade website performance and ultimately drive bounce rates.

Only 10 percent of the waiting period is defined by the HTML response to browser requests, and the remaining 90 percent of the delay is caused in rendering pages, parsing HTML, executing code scripts and retrieving embedded assets. Website performance overhaul with optimization tools and script tweaks can scrape off sizeable chunks from page load times, but perhaps not as effectively as developing a speed optimized website from scratch.

And the latter is more of a marketing strategy, a business decision and slight awareness in avoiding the most common mistakes that can potentially ruin online businesses by killing website performance.

W eb traffic and search engine ranking is primarily a vanity metric for website performance. Important as they are, neither is more indicative of online business success than sales figures and conversion rates.

Putting things into perspective, ecommerce websites with almost zero percent bounce rate, 15 percent conversion rates and 10, unique website visitors from low search engine rankings fare far better than high ranking sites enjoying , unique visits with only 0. The debate of conversion rate optimization can carry on for encyclopedic lengths, and implementing business best-practices on Frankensteinish websites can take tons of investments with efforts of patient execution spanning across months before any significant conversion rate improvement is yielded.

Online businesses focusing on improving website performance experience immediate results in the form of higher conversion rates and sky-rocketing sales. Page speed, in particular, fills the void in enhancing marketability by improving website user experience to keep impatient online customers engaged and satisfied.

The staggering statistics are as follows:. These statistics only describe how page speed impacts business success in the competitive cyberspace.

The pursuit for speed optimized website begins with identifying critical front-end issues most apparent under standard website performance testing processes.

Before the exploration for page speed bumps begins, understanding the behavior of the most impactful website speed performance indicators helps to accurately identify performance loopholes in websites.

Downloading tons of memory hogging website content within milliseconds of initiating browser requests is not entirely possible without a thorough revamp and speed optimization of slow websites.

In many cases, visitors only seek the primary information in the form of content or product information portrayed by Web pages.

Add a lot of complementary graphics and website features, and page rendering times rise beyond measure. Keeping the initial page speed high keeps visitors engaged even when the entire website content including bulky graphics take ages to render completely.

Monitoring high initial page speed by tracking parameters such as Time to First Byte TTFB or performing ping requests from website servers accurately describe initial page load times and page speed statistics.

If these take too long, work needs to be done at the back-end in the form of server-side and website core optimization.

Monitoring the time consumed in rendering entire page content onto requesting browsers is an integral element of end-user website experience testing.

This information drives strategic IT decisions in deploying and optimizing hardware infrastructure to maximize website performance. Regularly monitoring this performance indicator enables website owners to realize how the website performs as it scales in terms of size and content type.

With this information, webmasters can cache static content in separate locations such as Content Delivery Network CDN while maintaining dedicated back-end servers to efficiently deliver dynamically-loaded content.

One of the perks of operating an online business is the ever-expanding global market reach. But this reach is not always equally efficient — and hence effective — across the globe due to the very factors that limit client-server communication.

Government policies, bandwidth and technology limitations prevent optimum website performance around the world, so website speed and availability tests should be conducted across disparate locations to determine global website performance results impacting world-wide business reach.

Website performance varies with fluctuations in web traffic. Hosting servers handling the normal load at peak performance may lose page speed under excessive loads. Conducting stress tests, ramp tests, load tests and other performance tests on websites creates an accurate picture of how much web traffic the website can handle before losing performance or going down altogether.

Shared hosting providers running thousands of websites on single Apache servers fail to deliver high performance even when the website is well-designed with a clean and speed-optimized code.

Performance issues intensify during peak load times when insufficient server computing power fails to process website download requests efficiently. Monitoring server CPU load enables hosting companies and IT staff running locally hosted websites to keep a check on back-end hardware capabilities in handling unpredictable web traffic deluge.

Database performance is critical for websites maintaining dynamic content pulled from back-end databases. A mechanism should be in place to detect and alert for inaccuracies in data transmission.

Keeping an eye on free disk space on servers hosting websites locally helps avoid errors and data losses that lead to broken links and eventually degrade website performance. Website owners can leverage an array of free and premium website performance testing services to analyze web pages and generate tailored solutions to fill the deepest of performance loopholes hampering page speed.

Page speed testing tools powered by search engine giant Google , website monitoring specialists Pingdom and GTMetrix yield valuable insights into website performance indicators for free, and programmatically generate scores and suggestions to educate non-geeky website owners.

Check out these in-depth guides to help you get started. These tools use a bunch of browsers to load websites and replicate end-user website experience across disparate geographic locations.

Performance bottlenecks are monitored across various elements of the web page under scrutiny including file size, load time, response time and requests pertaining to various website parts JavaScript, CSS files, HTML, images, etc. The tools generate performance scores based on a set of rules developed in the context of Web page performance and user priorities.

The principles include resource caching, client-server round-trip times, data download and upload size, and a host of rules impacting end-user website experience in terms of page speed. Suggestions are generated in anticipation of page speed improvements that should occur by implementing appropriate performance optimization rules.

For example, if a large image file is served uncompressed, monitoring tools would recommend implementation of various measures to compress the bulky file. Such issues otherwise go unnoticed due to human errors or plain ignorance, neither of which can be completely eliminated.

At the same time, page speed monitoring tools would at least empower website owners to identify the issues and take appropriate steps in eradicating hidden website performance bottlenecks. The following test was conducted using the free Pingdom website speed test tool.

Visit Pingdom and conduct the test selecting various geographic locations according to the options provided, and compare the end-results. Enter your website and hit the Test Now button.

It will then return a summary of your site, including a performance grade, a total load time, the total page size, and the number of requests you have on your website. The performance insights section of the Pingdom speed test tool is very helpful.

These are all based on the Google PageSpeed Insight rules. Generally, if you improve these on your site, you should see a decrease in your overall load times. The tool lists all downloaded files in a waterfall chart form, sorting it in terms of load order, load time, size, type or URL.

Analyze the performance of each file download by reading results against the key chart provided within the tool:. The tool helps to identify the next-best actions for website speed optimization tactics. Performance ratings and test results are therefore bound to be different, and no single tool identifies every single performance bottleneck in website designs.

It is however recommended that you stick with one tool as you make improvements to better monitor your progress. However, testing across multiple tools, analyzing different website design elements and comparing multiple test results provides reasonable insights for online business owners to devise speed optimization strategies for their websites.

D eveloping a great website takes great work. Leading online businesses leverage industry-proven experience, supernatural web development skills and a killer web hosting service to develop websites boasting top-notch performance figures and user experience.

But for those who miss this starting point in their pursuit of speed-optimized websites, employing a minimalistic approach in executing simple DIY page speed optimization tactics works almost well enough to patch slow websites. The knowledge of investing in the right set of website speed optimization solutions and services, website management and perhaps downright coding trickery is essential to yield maximum website performance.

Strategic business decisions based on this knowledge contribute directly toward enhancing website performance that in turn, lead to better online sales, leads, conversions and ultimately business success.

Optimization is the buzzword of success in the cyber world. Cyberspace, like the real physical world of planets, stars and galaxies is itself in flux — a state of continuous change and evolution. In fact, change is the only consistent process across both the real and the cyber world.

Survival in these spaces depends on how well the inhabitants can adapt to varying resources and environmental circumstances. Online business owners and webmasters adapt their websites to maintain optimal results under the consistent impression of change by improvising and optimizing key elements of website design that make or break page speed.

As a general rule of thumb, larger files take longer to download than smaller files. Web page download time, also known as the Page Load Time depends on the total size of content assets being downloaded from hosting servers to the requesting browser. High-quality bulky images are the largest contributors to web page size, degrading page speed and agitating visitors eagerly waiting for the web page to load.

The following image optimization best-practices go a long way in reducing the negative impact of images on website speed:. Leverage image optimization plugins such as Imagify , Optimus WordPress Image Optimizer , WP Smush , TinyPNG.

And for more tips check out our in-depth image optimization guide. Not so long ago, 30 KB was considered as the ideal web page size. And that included images, content, graphics, and code making the entire page.

The popularity of CSS and JavaScript ripped apart the ceiling of 30 KB page size in delivering enriched website user experience. Yet, modern websites coded in CSS are better at downloading content from hosting servers to requesting browsers efficiently and accurately.

The following best practices ensure a speed-optimized CSS delivery:. Tools such as Autoptimize , WP Rocket , Cache Enabler , CloudFlare CDN , and W3 Total Cache are some of the most popular tools available for minifying JavaScript and CSS. If you are a Kinsta customer you can take advantage of the code minification feature that is built directly into the MyKinsta dashboard.

This allows customers to quickly and easily enable automatic CSS and JavaScript minification with a simple click. Reducing the number of client-server requests in delivering website content to Web browsers is an integral part of website speed optimization.

Webmasters can achieve this by not making too many folks with CSS, HTML and JavaScript requests. That is to say, optimize, minify and squish all unnecessary and compressible code lines.

Minification is particularly important for inline JavaScript and external files not cached. Google recommends minifying all JavaScript files over bytes of size, and a shaving off a minimum of 25 bytes to produce any noticeable difference toward page load time.

A rigorous approach toward designing speed optimized website would incorporate a strong intent on eliminating unnecessary bytes from the code. Utilizing all the coding space available, deleting extra spaces, indentation and line spaces while maintaining readability of the code reduces the overall size of website core and front-end files.

And for websites already developed without this strategy in perspective, combining multiple server requests for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into single ones effectively slashes sizeable chunks from page load times. Monitoring page load performance changes in response to implementing each minification process individually ensure that only the unnecessary code and spaces are deleted.

Minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML share common benefits: reduced network latency, fewer HTML requests, enhanced compression, faster browser downloading and execution, ultimately boosting page speed and yielding higher scores on website speed measuring tools. Additional website functionality with plugins comes at a price: performance degradation.

Unfortunately, webmasters deploy a myriad of plugins to add attractive but often unnecessary features such as gravatar, profile tools, website stats and font tools — some even use 10 different plugins for social media integration. The only benefit here is successfully avoiding manual coding.

Many popular websites carry as much as 80 plugins. Yet, the number is not entirely a concern if the installed plugins are developed well to avoid complex actions and expensive server processing.

If the answer to all these questions is YES , your reaction to the plugin in question should be a huge NO! A lot of WordPress experts recommend not using too many plugins. But many well-performing websites host over 80 plugins, until they install one low-quality plugin that adds half a second to page load time.

Similarly, using 10 plugins for simple and unique tasks is much better than deploying one plugin to perform all of the complex tasks by itself. Exceptions include high-quality SEO plugins by credible developers, such asYoast SEO , All In One SEO Pack free WordPress SEO plugins and the likes.

Revision management is one of the perks that WordPress has to offer. The CMS automatically keeps track of the content created on the CMS and makes all of it available for future changes.

To the server, this costs unnecessary processing through additional database entries not actually required in the first place. Controlling the number of revisions stored relieves the website core of useless burden.

Check out our in-depth guide on how to optimize WordPress revisions for faster performance. This database gets crowded over time, not only with unnecessary content and post revisions, but also with garbage data.

Database optimization revolves around getting rid of garbage data and useless content from cluttered databases, shrinking them in size and making it easier for website hosting servers to fetch requested content efficiently, within minimum processing cycles. This can also involve ensuring that you are using InnoDB for your MySQL database tables, as opposed to MyISAM.

Learn how to convert myISAM to InnoDB. Especially on older and large sites, this can be the culprit for slow query times on your site due to autoloaded data that is left behind from third-party plugins and themes. Change as appropriate.

Compression According to Google , every day the cyber world sees 99 years of human years wasted due to uncompressed Web content. And although most of the latest Web browsers support content compression capabilities, not every website delivers compressed contents.

Visitors to these bandwidth-hogging websites experience insanely slow interactions with Web pages. Primary reasons for this unfavorable and mostly unintentional website behavior include misconfigured hosting servers, Web proxies, old or buggy browsers and antivirus software.

Uncompressed content hurts bandwidth-constrained users receiving the Web content in agonizingly lengthy page load times. Server: On it! Browser: Ouch! Okay, client-server communication is perhaps a bit more formal and less dramatic than the above narrative.

Most of the problem lies in the way client-server communication goes in the HTML world. HTML files making almost the entire Web content includes several redundant code instances. Google recommends the following compression tactics to deliver website content efficiently:.

Not following the above recommendations actually increases file size and page load times due to the overhead of compression and decompression. Developers crave simplicity in website design code. Website code easier to create, read and maintain leads to efficient website development processes. This includes using the available code functions frequently to cut short extensive coding for specific website functionality.

However, adding too many extraneous loops and unnecessary code lines increases page rendering times by a few milliseconds. Influx a torrent of website traffic, and the milliseconds compound to plunge page speed well below acceptable standards.

Webmasters can reduce these response times by delivering cached copies of the requested content instead of rendering it repeatedly in response to every single user request that pings their server.

Web cache is the mechanism of temporarily storing copies of web content to satisfy subsequent user requests from the cache database when specific conditions are met.

This process reduces the number of client-server round trips taken in delivering static website content to requesting browsers. Website owners can enable caching with the following add-ons and configurations when hosting service providers do not provide server-side caching:.

Along with static cacheable content, websites also host dynamic information containing unique attributes changing regularly for every end-user. This is the art of caching smaller elements of non-cacheable dynamic website content.

These time-and-resource consuming processes are circumvented by delivering the desired output stored as a cached copy. Fragment caching stores the output of some code blocks that remain unchanged across varied versions of the dynamic content. When the code runs and reaches the code block cached for a predetermined time, the server queries and delivers the cached output of this code instead of executing it repeatedly until the time limit reaches.

The end result is a cache-optimized website content for maximum page speed even for ecommerce and membership-based websites handling intensely dynamic content.

Kinsta actually provides four different types of caching , all of which are all automatically done at the software or server-level. So there is no need to mess with third-party plugins. CDN is an extension of cache optimization designed to supercharge website performance aimed specifically at globally dispersed web traffic.

CDNs consist of a network of servers hosting cached copies of web pages. Internet visitors requesting this information are directed to the nearest server within this network based on their geographic location. Traditional benefits of CDN including performance boost, high availability, and page rank collectively lift business bottom line.

Check out all the reasons why you should be using a CDN. WordPress essentially democratized the web by empowering citizens of the cyberworld to create their own blogs and launch products and services online with minimal investments. In general, website owners leverage one of the following hosting services to keep their websites up and running:.

Among these, employing managed WordPress hosting for end-to-end website development and management services is the most cost-effective and productive option for maintaining an ultra-high performance website. Features of managed hosting services impacting page speed and website performance include:.

With the release of PHP 7 came huge performance gains! So big in fact, that it should be a priority over a lot of the small optimizations you might play around with on your WordPress site.

The following benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements with PHP 7 over its previous iterations. PHP 7 allows the system to execute twice as many requests per second in comparison with the PHP 5. We also ran our own PHP benchmarks. And similarly to the benchmarks above, we saw that PHP 7.

PHP 7. The performance gap between PHP 5. PHP 8. Congratulations and thanks for reading it. We hope you found at least a couple of great bits of advice that you can act upon now! At Kinsta, we provide the fastest WordPress hosting services and with our infrastructure you can rest assured that all the server-side optimizations are taken care of.

Last, but not least, if you found our guide helpful please share it with your friends and followers! This is a great post Mark, Page speed is an important point if you want your website rank higher.

Well written Mark. All these performance tips are right on the way of a faster web app. Another room for improvement is to avoid CSS expressions.

Thanks for sharing informative informative article. Lot of of stuff is here with lot of information about every subject. Long but great article Mark : You can also seed up your website by inlining the above the fold css.

Its easy to generate it using tools like the one from sitelocity. com Do you know a better one? Nice post, but i am very lazy to do it myself : I give this job speedupgency company and now my site loading speed is 2.

your website is amazing and your articles that you post is very informative. I always see your website and always get new interesting information. Thanks for it. The speed of compression must be faster than the time taken in delivering the content uncompressed.

Hey Leonardo, Those GZIP ranges are what Google used to recommend. We appreciate you checking. Thank you for the article. Do I need to specify the lowest network speed we are global site to make sure the website performs well in majority of cases?

Where can I get some examples of network speed in various geographies? Hey MJ! I have a potentially stupid question because I think I know the answer. The client wanting their images will not mind waiting for their page to load as it would be expected, but the rest of the users will need a fast loading site.

Any way around this? The only person that would really be impacted by it is the person loading it. You can see how many times this post has been shared, that tells you how much helpful this article is.

Keep updating the users.