Websites are becoming more graphically beautiful and dynamic. As a result, images and source codes are getting bigger and bigger. This has an immediate detrimental effect on the loading speed of your website. And since ranking in search results of search engines such as Google and Bing depends, among other things, on loading speed, it is important that your website be optimized in this regard. We would be happy to give you some tips on how to handle this yourself, as well as help with a consultation.
Scale and compress images
Too often, websites display images that are too large. For example, a photo can easily be several megabytes (MB) in size. These formats are suitable for high-quality printing, but not for the Internet. For standard screens, an image containing 72 dots per inch is sufficient, while a file suitable for printing requires 300 dots per inch. Therefore, scale any images to make them suitable for the Web. It is also essential that the image be losslessly compressed. That is, the file size is reduced with no loss of quality to the image.
Compress CSS and JavaScript
Average CSS and JavaScript files have grown substantially in recent years. These files contain programming code that determines how the website looks and how it reacts when you click a button, for example. Because CSS code and JavaScript code often consist of multiple files, a Web browser must also make multiple connections to the Web server: a time-consuming task. Merging all these files into one CSS file and one JavaScript file requires only two additional connections. Removing unnecessary white space from files often saves another 50% or more in file size.
Enable a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is a server network optimized for providing files over the Internet. The advantage of a CDN is that your Web site is distributed to servers around the world. This allows a computer in the United States to display your website as fast as a computer in the Netherlands. In addition, a CDN is able to handle, without loss of speed, many more requests than a single Web server.
Get your website checked by specialists
As specialists in converting websites, we find that increased loading speed (indirectly) improves conversions. Do you need better loading speed, but aren’t quite sure which of the above ways suits you best? Let one of our experts check your site for performance and find out what is needed.
