How to make my website fast as a rocket?
A constant worry for every owner of a website is to manage it properly. Optimizing, it is vital not to be left behind competitors. Remember, if a website doesn’t appear at the top of Google’s results, it is like it doesn’t exist for potential clients.
There are 3 main criteria to rank:
- Offer quality content on your website. Include stuff that provides significant value to your specific audience.
- Fast loading! Yes, a fast website will be better ranked by Google, so better positioned in the search results of your clients. And of course, it is necessary for giving the user a satisfying experience.
- Mobile optimization. Check that the content of your website look good when consumed by users from their mobiles.
Keeping this in mind, here you have some effective recommendations that really will make your website, fast as a rocket!
So, how to make your website faster?
Get a good web hosting
Choosing web hosting is not easy, but it is very important. There are many providers and plans. Sometimes it’s hard to get the difference among them, beyond the price. As a starting point:
Look for modern servers, with SSD and a variety of resources included (basic and more advanced for the growing of your business). Always check the server’s location and prices. Get stick to the real needs of your business! It is the best way not to get so lost.
Prefer a light theme
It’s common when developing a website to think “spectacular”. Ok, but to load all the spectacular stuff could take so much time. Such a website is pointless if visitors won’t wait to see it fully. And Google will rank it in the least seen search results.
So light and mobile-friendly theme is the best choice.
Optimizing images
Large images take longer to be loaded. Prefer compressed formats like .JPG and be careful with the resolution. Keep it down. There’s no sense in using 20Mpx images when you can have 1MPx ones that are good enough for posting and really fast for loading.
Shrink those pics! Make your huge images smaller and experience the difference. For both compressing and resizing, there are free choices online.
Caching your website
Caching means to save unchanging elements of your website for later use. Every time a user requests your website, the last cached version of it will be displayed without delay. Just in case of recent changes, it will take a bit of time to load the website, and again, the last version will be cached.
Caching really reduces the server’s load, the needed bandwidth, and the time that users have to wait when visiting your site.
No matter what CMS are you using, there are cache plugins that can significantly boost the speed of your website.
Suggested article: Anycast DNS – Why start using it today?
Get your own CDN
This is a very effective but expensive choice. It is getting very popular among big companies.
Content delivery network (CDN) means to have many points of presence (PoPs) thanks to servers located worldwide. So a copy of your website is located on different servers. When a user wants to visit your site, the request is redirected to the closest PoP, not necessarily to the original hosting server that could be far from the user’s location.
Activate HTTP keep-alive response headers
Every HTTP request means to grab a file (a content of your website: JavaScript, video, images…), distribute and close. Multiply this process by several requests.
Keep-alive headers allow the user’s browser to download all that content (multiple files) through a constant TCP connection. This communication server-browser avoids the process of requesting individually every single file.
Conclusion
To get a fast website is possible. Some optimizing actions can be implemented inside the website, while others are external. Some choices are expensive but worthy. Others are even free!
A proper combination of both could really boost your website’s speed and launch it like a rocket, directly to Google’s first search results page! Good luck!