11GetToday’s internet users generally expect fast, high-performance websites and we suggest you don’t tax their patience. That’s why we provide you with the following tips that reveal how the loading time of a website can be significantly reduced by simple optimization without having to redo your site design or set up distribution caches around the planet.

Tip 1: Optimize browser caching

Browsers often store used elements from sites in the cache not to have to access it again and again. However, better to assign the files a specific storage time not to overcrowd the cache. Thus, for instance, repeated HTML files are buffered only a second, CSS and JavaScript files can be dated to two weeks and images even three weeks, to consume just little cache.

Tip 2: Adjust for mobile devices

Desktop websites are unfortunately often not optimally presented on the respective mobile device, which means that users have to scroll sometimes endlessly until they find what they are looking for. To make the site more functional, how about considering mobile optimization? With responsive design the site is automatically adapted to the respective unused screen size, and texts as well as headers are compressed and displayed on the device in reduced size.

Tip 3: Reduce graphics and images

In a graphically upgraded website, primarily the heavy file sizes of images are crucial for long loading times, therefore it is recommended to compress graphics and photos to reduce the waiting time: Image files can be compressed lossless, whereby the first variant ignores meta-information and identical image sections, reducing the data enormously that way, whereas with online tools like e.g. tinypng.com image sizes can be minimized by up to 50%.

Tip 4: Compress text files

Files with a large storage capacity prolong the loading time. How about combining repeated text patterns into a ZIP file or applying a server-side compression algorithm for HTML, JavaScript and CSS files? Whereby image formats such as .jpg, .png or .woff no longer need to be compressed when they are already reduced.

Tip 5: Use ‘Lazy Loading’

Many websites load the complete content directly when called up, using all resources at once when doing so. The result is a high load time. In order to prevent this, it’s possible to reload file set asynchronously. Hence, the "Lazy Loading" is one of the simplest optimizations for fast websites. WordPress, for example, offers already a finished script, but for larger web projects an individually developed, own Lazy Loading Script is worthwhile.

If you think these tips are too pathetic, think again, just to make sure not to miss out on the basics. Studies show that customers visit a shop more often when having a good user experience on the site. Hence, considering the tips or a PageSpeed optimization is at least worth the trouble both for operators of sites and online stores.

By MediaBUZZ