Website Speed Optimization-Hidden key for better user experience

How to enhance User Experience?

There are many intricate steps, features, and characteristics that affect user experience and their interest in your website and hence the product.

The vital reason of indulging internet in every aspect of our lives is to stay connected and to get hold of the whole world in a jiffy and as fast as possible. With the introduction of internet connections like 3G and now 4G, people want websites to load as soon as the URL is typed in the address bar. It's been deduced from various surveys and by many researchers that an average user waits for maximum 3 to 7 secs on a website and if the website takes more than that time to load, the user loses interest and opts some other option.
Businessmen nowadays don't bat an eye to spare a few extra pennies to turn potential and efficient clients. After incorporating such expensive and brainstormed marketing strategies, it must be your utmost priority that people don't leave it due to time-consuming loading.

Why website's loading speed must be taken care of?

It's already mentioned that an average user spends 3 to 7 seconds on a website and if it doesn't load in that span, they tend to leave it.
Even Google considers such websites to rank higher in its search engine which has enhanced speed. So, the website speed is no longer just about convenience, it’s also part of your SEO.
If SEO is not that big a concern for you and your website(though it should be), then the website's speed should be enhanced keeping the user experience in mind. Web Pages and Websites with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversion.

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There are many websites that can easily let you know about the loading time of your website. There are many websites that even provides you an overview of the reason that making your website lag, just by a few click and within a few minutes.

Now the big question is, How to enhance the speed of your website?

There are several reasons due to which the speed of your website can lag and in turn can make your business lose potential clients. This article will guide to provide you through the measures that can help in enhancing the speed of your website

1. Removing useless plugins

Plugins are a great way for extending the features of any website and to easily incorporate third-party services. One of the most used CMS, WordPress has hundreds of plugins to fulfill a wide genre of requirements.
Often due to various pleasing extensions that plugins provide and due to the vital advantage that many plugins are extensively easy to get hold of, free and easy to install, amateur developers and blogger get carried away and install n number of plugins which in turn, unknowingly makes the website bulky.
So the first step is to get rid of those unwanted and unnecessary plugins, no matter how efficient they seem, if they aren't being used then you need to get rid of those plugins. So that your website can shed some burden.

2. Enable Compression

Programs like GZip must be used to compress the code. This software application is used to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes.
Images are a vital part of designing a website and more the images on the website more intriguing it seems but these images make website bulkier. So, even the images should be optimized, there are many plugins available in the market serving the purpose of compressing the images to a presentable, eye-pleasing and yet is light on the website.

3. Minify Code

Loading speed of a website can be reduced to an extent by minifying the code such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript. By minifying, it means to get rid of extra spaces, commas, and any other unnecessary characters and to chug off all the undesirable code comments, codes, formatting or anything that's making the code bulky and is unnecessary.

4. Leverage Browsing Cache

When you visit a webpage, the files your browser requests are stored on your computing storage in the browser's cache. Browsers fetch cache to improve performance for frequently accessed webpages. If you click "back" and return to that page, your browser can retrieve most of the files it needs from the cache instead of requesting the files from the server again and again.
Using cached data can decrease your website's loading time tremendously when you leverage browser caching, your webpage files will get stored in the browser cache and the pages will load much faster for repeat visitors and so will other pages that share those same resources.

5. Improve Server Response Time

The time taken by a website is highly dependent on the time that is taken by the website to fetch the information and files requested from the server. To improve your server response time, look for performance bottlenecks like slow database queries, slow routing, or a lack of adequate memory and fix them. The optimal server response time is under 200ms.

6. Using CDN(Content Distribution Network)

Also known as Content Delivery Network, it is another effective and efficient strategy that can be used to enhance the speed of website by globally distributing your website through a network of servers. Global CDN is a network of servers located around the world. What a CDN does is it reduces the load on your main server by caching your website and distributing through the network of servers and delivering it based on the geolocation of the website visitor.
For example, if someone from London visits your website, then your CDN will pull your website information from one of its servers based somewhere near London or England to deliver the content faster to your visitor instead of fetching the information from your main server in that might be in the US. This reduces the load on your main website server and resource usage.

There are many alternative ways to enhance the speed as well which incorporates of switching to a faster Web hosting service or switching to a lighter theme. Speed of the website is an important factor to boost your business and to turn potential client from all around the globe. Above illustrated steps can be efficiently used to enhance the speed of any website and hence make it visible in the search engine and in turn ample catch eyes of potential clients.

Redefine Webs is a firm consisting of Web Development, designing, marketing and UI/UX experts, who are always there to give your website speed boost to make its presence significant in the search engine. We make sure to implement all the required steps to make your website light in the initial development stage.