Which page loads faster

If you're using WordPress, you could either use a combination of the Autoptimize and Async JavaScript plugins to take care of this task easily. Optimizing the way your files load can help improve page loading speed. This means removing unnecessary spaces, characters, comments, and other unneeded elements to reduce the size of the files.

Decreasing your files' sizes also makes it easier to combine them. The result is cleaner code, and leaner web pages that load faster. Of course, combing through every line of code for each of your site's files isn't exactly efficient.

This popular plugin makes it easy to aggregate and minify your scripts and styles automatically:. Considering the wide variety of features and settings it offers, configuring this plugin can be a bit overwhelming at first.

To make your job easier, feel free to check out this guide on how to set up Autoptimize on your website. It does this by hosting and delivering copies of your site's static content from servers located across the globe. A CDN works with, rather than in place of, your host. In addition to the server that hosts your primary website, you can leverage a CDN to distribute copies of your site's files among strategically-chosen data centers. This can maximize performance , by reducing the distance data requests have to travel between browsers and your host's servers.

You have a variety of CDN options to choose from , one of which is opting for a host that provides a CDN you can enable it directly from your own dashboard. Not all plugins are created equal. Having too many plugins on your site can cause unnecessary bloat that slows it down. Additionally, plugins that are outdated or aren't well maintained can pose a security threat , and even introduce compatibility issues that hamper performance.

Therefore, it's a smart idea to minimize the number of plugins you use on your WordPress site. Of course, one of the easiest ways to do this is by disabling and deleting any plugins you don't currently use. We also recommend reviewing the plugins you have installed, to evaluate whether they're actually necessary.

There might be some tools that have overlapping functionalities and features, and others that are simply no longer relevant to your needs.

Finally, certain plugins may slow your site down more than others. To identify any plugins that are reducing your page speeds, you can try testing them individually. Then turn them back on one by one. Each time you activate a plugin, use a speed testing tool such as PageSpeed Insights to see if your score and timings have been affected.

Many plugins might increase your page speeds by a small margin. However, if you see a sudden large increase, it may be time to find an alternative tool that serves the same purpose but is better optimized. Ultimately, reducing page loading speed improves not only the overall performance and UX of your website but its SEO as well. Luckily for you, there are a variety of methods you can use to decrease your loading times. In addition to leveraging a CDN and caching your pages, you can use plugins to optimize your images, defer loading scripts, and minify your site's files.

Using a hosting solution optimized for performance can also have a major influence on your site's speed. Remember, though — every second your web pages take to load drastically increases the chance your visitors will leave. How long will you able to run your business while losing leads?

Originally published Oct 15, PM, updated May 25 Logo - Full Color. Contact Sales. It does not constitute professional advice. All information is subject to change at any time without notice.

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It is just as important for broadband content and can lead to dramatic improvements even for your visitors with the fastest connections. Reducing page weight through the elimination of unnecessary whitespace and comments, commonly known as minimization, and by moving inline script and CSS into external files, can improve download performance with minimal need for other changes in the page structure.

Other tools can "compress" JavaScript by reformatting the source or by obfuscating the source and replacing long identifiers with shorter versions. Reducing the number of files referenced in a web page lowers the number of HTTP connections required to download a page, thereby reducing the time for these requests to be sent, and for their responses to be received.

Depending on a browser's cache settings, it may send a request with the If-Modified-Since header for each referenced file, asking whether the file has been modified since the last time it was downloaded. Too much time spent querying the last modified time of the referenced files can delay the initial display of the web page, since the browser must check the modification time for each of these files, before rendering the page.

If you use background images a lot in your CSS, you can reduce the number of HTTP lookups needed by combining the images into one, known as an image sprite. This technique works best with elements that will have limited dimensions, and will not work for every use of a background image.

However, the fewer HTTP requests and single image caching can help reduce page-load time. For the purposes of this article, a CDN is a means to reduce the physical distance between your server and your visitor. As the distance between your server origin and visitor increases, the load times will increase.

Suppose your website server is located in the United States and it has a visitor from India; the page load time will be much higher for the Indian visitor compared to a visitor from the US.

A CDN is a geographically distributed network of servers that work together to shorten the distance between the user and your website. CDNs store cached versions of your website and serve them to visitors via the network node closest to the user, thereby reducing latency.

Since each separate domain costs time in a DNS lookup, the page load time will grow along with the number of separate domains appearing in CSS link s and JavaScript and image src es. This may not always be practical; however, you should always take care to use only the minimum necessary number of different domains in your pages. In particular, pay attention to the Last-Modified header. It allows for efficient page caching; by means of this header, information is conveyed to the user agent about the file it wants to load, such as when it was last modified.

And it is possible for your site to be impacted by traffic spikes from other sites using the same server as you. With shared hosting, you share certain resources like CPU, disk space, and RAM with other sites hosted on the same server. This is a good in-between option. It protects your site from everyone else on your server without the cost required for dedicated hosting. KeyCDN explains this using the analogy of living in an apartment vs. There are also fewer residents in the building.

You can look at dedicated hosting, then, as owning a home. With a dedicated server, you have much more space — but you also have more work to do with configuration and technical setup. Pages with lots of images and other content can often end up being over KB in size.

To get a sense of how compression could speed up your site, you can use GIDNetwork to run a compression audit. This tells you the uncompressed size of your page, which you can later use as a benchmark to measure the results of compression. The smaller your files, the faster your pages will load. Compressing files is one of the easiest ways to reduce load times, and today, enabling compression with Gzip is considered standard practice.

Gzip is a file format and software application that essentially locates strings of similar code in your text files, then temporarily replaces them to make the files smaller. Most web servers can compress files in Gzip format before sending them for download, either by calling a third-party module or using built-in routines. The exact code you need depends on your server but if your site runs on Apache, for example, it looks like this:.

When you visit a website, the elements on the page you visit are stored on your hard drive in a cache, or temporary storage. This means that the next time you visit the site, your browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server.

The first time someone comes to your website, they have to download the HTML document, stylesheets, javascript files and images before being able to use your page. That may be as many as 30 components and 2. But enabling caching can shave off a significant amount of time of returning visitors and provide a better user experience.

This means that when a user returns to your site, it will load faster. If you use a VPS or dedicated server, you can also enable object caching to speed up dynamic elements on your site.

Object caching is a resource-intensive process and can end up slowing down your site — the exact opposite of what you want to accomplish with the plugin. You can add lines of code that tell browsers what to cache and how long to store it, which will look something like this :.

In general, static resources should have a cache lifetime of at least a week. Third-party resources like ads or widgets should have a cache lifetime of at least one day.

Images can play a major role in your site speed. One of the best ways to get your conversion rate to this level is including lots of helpful product images. This means that if you want to run a successful eCommerce site , images are absolutely necessary.

That also means image compression i s critical — and this is important whether your site includes an eCommerce store or not. You can see how big of an impact images make on any of your pages with a tool like Pingdom. R educing their size could likely have a big impact on how long the page takes to load.

One of the easiest ways to reduce image file sizes is cropping your images to the correct size. For example, if you want an image to appear as px wide, resize the image to that width.

This requires your page to load the full image, then adjust it to the appropriate size, slowing your page. If you use the width parameter to make images appear smaller on your site, resizing those images should be a priority. You can also use this plugin to automatically resize all of the new files you upload. Before adding an image to your site, upload it into this tool and select whether you want lossy or lossless compression. JPG is generally your best option for photos. This data loss is undetectable to viewers in photos, but results in a smaller file size than most image file types.

PNGs, on the other hand, use lossless compression. If you need to have clear lines and crisp detail, PNG is the way to go. This is the best option for logos, screenshots, line art, and other detailed graphics. In particular, make sure to avoid empty image src codes. This can add unnecessary traffic to your servers and even corrupt user data. Fortunately, this is an easy fix to make. Either add the file path of the image you want to include, or remove the extra tags altogether.

Beyond the server that hosts your site, you can also use other networks of servers to decrease load times for your visitors. When your site is hosted on one server, each user who visits it sends requests to that same server.

This means that when your site experiences high levels of traffic, the time it takes to process each request increases, slowing down load times for all of them. When you consider that high-traffic times typically present a ton of growth potential for your business, this is far from ideal.

With a CDN, you cache your site on a global network of servers. Your network might look something like this :. If a user from South Africa visits your site, thir browser could download files from a nearby server. The content that user receives is identical, but can load much faster than it would if their browser were making requests to a server that was geographically far away.

This eliminates loading lags and latency issues that users located far from hosting servers sometimes experience. The exact improvements vary between page, with pages that have lots of large images benefitting the most from a CDN. They have more data centers and focus solely on improving load times. The one you choose depends on whether you want those extra features, or just want to focus on improving speed.

And either way, getting set up is a fairly quick process. These should typically be cdn. This naming format is standard practice and will be easiest to remember if you ever run into issues or need to consult a developer. And if you want to use Cloudflare, the process is even simpler. This take about one minute, and will how all of your DNS records, including any subdomains. You can decide which ones you want to enable.