The importance of improving your website’s loading times doesn’t need any explanation. Long loading time not only frustrates the users, but also hurts SEO, get your website’s speed to the next level. Thankfully there are a few methods, that can help you optimizing your site, to be much faster for the users.

Page caching

Cached pages are served up as static HTML versions of your page in order to avoid potentially time consuming queries to your database. These are created usually by search engine companies and servers, that can be server to the users directly.

This can dramatically speed up the loading times of often viewed content, but of course if there is a change in content it needs to be loaded. This also lightens the load on your server, which is beneficial for you and the users as well.

Optimized front-end and back-end

Your website needs to be on stable feet. If your code is not efficient the loading time will be long. You need to be an expert or hire one to write good quality code for your website. There are also alternative solutions to this.

You can use pre-written modules if you don’t feel confident enough to do it yourself, or use third party tools. In this case there is no guarantee that the code will be the best. The best solution is in the most times not cheap, or time consuming, but your website’s speed can increase greatly.

Optimized media – no third party

If you use a lot of HD images, animations or videos the user needs to download these along with your website. It will be very pretty and shiny, but no one wants to wait 5 seconds to view a site, no matter how beautiful it is. Try to decrease the quality of the media on your site, remember speed is the key.

Even a little change in quality can mean a lot in terms of loading times. Try to avoid using flash content, because that can lead to relatively heavy loads. Also very important, to have the media on your server, don’t load it from third party places. You can not trust other pages, and if these fail to respond the users will only see that the problem is on your site.

Gzip

Another great way to improve you website’s speed is simple compression. You can easily do this with Gzip. Compressing your site means that you will need to send less data to the users. Obviously resulting better loading times. Since 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that support Gzip, so this is definitely a great option.

Good service provider

A good hosting provider can help you a lot with your loading times. Better response times can be achieved with choosing a good hosting plan, that ensures that you don’t run out of server resources due to high traffic on your site.

VPS plans have separated resources, so you don’t have to worry about who you share the server with. Of course there are more problems that can arise, the correct choice in terms of provider needs to be made as well.