“Slow and steady wins the race”. This phrase actually applies to the real world but in the cyber world, this is not the case. In the digital business world “Slow and steady does not win the race”. The first and foremost thing which this digital race demand is “speed”. The need for speed in the digital world cannot be denied because this is what determines the winner. One who gains the fastest speed wins the fastest.

In this article, we’ll be providing you the 10 essential actionable tips to optimize your website for speed. Let’s out shadow the pinpoints of this article:

1. Optimize Your Website for Speed
    1.1. Optimize your Web Images
    1.2. Shift to Upgraded Web Hosting Plan
    1.3. Choose a Reliable Content Management System (CMS)
    1.4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
    1.5. Browser Caching
    1.6. Reduce HTTP Requests
    1.7. Optimize JavaScript and CSS
    1.8. Optimize your Site’s Database Regularly
    1.9. Throw Out Unnecessary or Extra Plugins
    1.10. Monitor the Desktop and Mobile Web Page Loading Speed
2. Queries Snippet
3. The Need for Digital Speed

Optimize Your Website for Speed

Speed! Speed! Speed! This is the first thing that every searcher actually demands. But sometimes this kind of expectation leads the searcher to disappointment. Slow responses, longer web page loading time etc. take the searcher straight to quit the webpage. therefore, website speed optimization is necessary. Don’t panic if your website is slow. What are we for then? We have come up with the solution. We will tell you how to improve website loading speed. You just need to do follow the given tips. So, here we go:

Optimize your Web Images

Images occupy a lot of space on the websites. The size, as well as the quality of images, must be taken into account before uploading it. Often, web images are of large sizes that results in slow loading. Taking this into account, people usually upload small sized images of low quality which at the end marks a negative impact on the customers. A major drawback! You must be thinking how you can upload small sized images with high quality. Right? There are plenty of optimizers to use that compresses your web image without lowering its quality. JPEG-Optimizer, Optimizilla, Kraken etc. are some of the best image optimizers to choose from.

Shift to Upgraded Web Hosting Plan

One of the reasons why your website is slow can be the inadequate web host. There are mainly three types of web hosting:

• Shared hosting
• VPS hosting
• Dedicated hosting

The cheaper among them is shared hosting, then comes VPS while dedicated hosting is quite expensive. Usually, people who create their website for the very first time, choose a cheaper web hosting plan i.e. Shared hosting. With the passage of time, they keep on adding the data to their website. As with shared hosting, different websites are being hosted on a single server which means a single server has to take the burden of all the hosted websites. The heavier the data, the more time will it take to load. This ultimately slows down the site which in turn leave a bad impression on your visitors and customers. So, to avoid this kind of problem, one must upgrade his web hosting plan to VPS or Dedicated.

Choose a Reliable Content Management System (CMS)

CMS plays a critical role in the performance of any website. You must rely on a trusted and secure CMS. In this regard, WordPress is the one everyone can rely on. A CMS basically manages the content of your website. If the content is not managed properly, it can have a bad impact on your business performance. Apart from WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are other CMS that you can trust. But using less popular CMS for your site will be risky as it may cause your website to run slow. Maybe one of the reasons for their less or non-popularity is that its performance is slow. So, you need to do proper research for choosing the most reliable CMS that can fulfill your demands.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content Delivery Network contains a set of web servers which are used for delivering the content to the users at different locations. This makes the web page to load faster. In other words, a CDN reduces the distance between the user and the server to make the browsing faster and more efficient.

Browser Caching

Caching is the temporary storing of recently accessed information on the user’s server. It generally saves time while opening a file. Enabling caching lets the user access the recently opened file without having to wait for it to load again as in the first place. This ultimately boosts up the speed of your website. If you are using WordPress, you can use these best caching plugins:

• WP Rocket
• W3 Total Cache
• WP Super Cache

Reduce HTTP Requests

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests are the information requests by a user to the server. For instance, if a user wants to access certain files then a request will be sent to the server to provide the required files to the user. The server will either accept the request by giving access or will respond with the “File not found”. The HTTP request will look like this:

GET /path/to/file/index.html http/1.0

And the response, if the file not found will be like:

Http/1.0 404 Not Found

These requests usually slow down your website’s speed. In order to reduce HTTP requests, you should lower the number of files, use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and merge CSS, JavaScript and HTML files together. This will result in enhancing your website’s speed.

Optimize JavaScript and CSS

Including lots of JavaScript and CSS files on your website will result in lots of HTTP requests which in turn decelerate your website speed. Therefore, optimizing CSS and JavaScript files are necessary. It’s up to you, you can either reduce the number of these files or can combine both of them.

Optimize your Site’s Database Regularly

As cleaning is necessary for human beings, so is the optimization for the websites. One, owning a business website, must do data optimization regularly especially those using WordPress. Database optimization is an effective way to boost any website. If you don’t optimize your database, it will simply slow down your website. How? The answer is that while choosing such kinds of CMS or plugins, the data in your database keeps on increasing making the website heavier and at the same time slower. That is why optimization is necessary as these kinds of things can take up a lot of space. But before optimization, always keep your data backed up so that the necessary data required further may not be lost.

Throw Out Unnecessary or Extra Plugins

Everyone knows unnecessary things are useless, then why keeping unnecessary plugins to your site? Just throw them out. They are one of those which are stopping your website to boost. You can say that they are a hindrance for your site’s speed. So, you need to eliminate those plugins that are of no use. Use a WordPress plugin P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to check which plugins are affecting your website’s speed.

Monitor the Desktop and Mobile Web Page Loading Speed

Always keep a track of your web pages loading speed on both desktop and mobile phones. As in today’s world, the use of mobile phone is increasing it is thus necessary to monitor your websites loading speed especially on mobile. The speed of your website can have an eternal impact on your business performance. Thus, it is highly essential to keep a track of your website speed. However, the tweet by blog engage below has explained in a plain way through their infographic that how speed affects your website.

How Website Speed Affects Your Bottom Line: Infographic https://t.co/dVPEHDzzk2 @EpicBizNews #blogengage pic.twitter.com/LfY757QgpH

— Blog Engage (@blogengage) October 11, 2018

Queries Section

Why is Website Speed Important?

The speed of your website is an utterly important factor that has the potential to make or break your customer’s trust. A slow website takes the user away from your website that is way a negative effect on your business.

How to Test a Website Speed?

You can use the following free tools for the website speed test:

• Pingdom
• PageSpeed Insights
• GTmetrix
• YSlow

What Does it Mean to Optimize your Website?

To speed up the website by reducing unnecessary things or by merging them, are meant to optimize your website. Compressing images, reducing or merging CSS and JS files, clean up the database, removing unnecessary plugins etc. all fall in this category. However, website optimization is also termed as SEO optimization which is another aspect. This optimization is done to improve the ranking of your website in search engines.

How Do I Increase my WordPress Website Speed?

There are different things to do for enhancing your WordPress website speed. These to-do things include:

• Opt a good host
• Compress your web images by using plugins
• Optimize your database daily
• Remove extra or unused plugins
• Use a CDN
• Enable caching

How Do I Optimize My Website for Search Engines?

You can improve your website’s ranking in search engines by:

• Adding up necessary information as much as you can
• Including the most searched keywords in your content
• Making your website responsive
• Updating your content whenever necessary
• Targeting your customer’s needs

The Need for Digital Speed

Today in this developing digital world, there’s a dire need for speed, especially for the online business owners. People expect the websites to be extremely fast. So, you need to make sure that you are providing your users with an uninterrupted experience. You can do this by adopting the above-given tips. Coding Pixel is always looking to provide the best assistance to its customers.

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