A website may have optimized images and minimalist designs, but they could still load really slowly. There are different reasons why this could happen. As an example, there could be issues with hosting servers and pages could be poorly optimized. By investing enugh time and effort, we should be able to ensure faster loading time. Faster websites are more usable for users and they are able to get more information in a specific period of time. In some cases, there’s something with the way we build our webpages. Large-sized images are no longer problem for many Internet users due to fast Internet connections, but they could still cause loading issues on mobile devices.
Some smartphone browsers may need more time to render high resolution images. While it’s quite common for people to use CMS and other ready to use platforms, many are still using webpages that they build from scratch. In this case, we should use the W3C validation service to check our XHTML page. This will make sure that our webpages can be rendered quickly by mobile browsers. However, it is preferable to use proven available platforms that have been fully validated. In order to improve performance, we should also use less HTTP requests. In general, request occurs when the browser asks the server to process and send a webpage to user’s browser. Browsers have limited number of requests that can happen simultaneously. Our website will loads faster if it can be sent with the fewest number of requests at one time.
If we want to improve the performance of our website, CSS sprites should come in handy. It allows us to load single image in operation. We also need to optimize JavaScript, especially if our JS files have a lot of non-related characters and white space. By optimizing our JS files, their sizes can be reduced dramatically, because unwanted characters can be removed. CSS scripts can also be optimized or even combined to simplify the coding structure of our website. By combining multiple CSS files, our website will require less HTTP requests and the overall performance will be faster. Another solution is to use content delivery network or CDN. Typical servers have problem processing multiple large images and videos.
Commonly accessed files can be distributed to different servers around the world to improve access. However, not all web hosting providers offer this feature if they have only a single centralized data center. Performance can also be improved by the use of caching. Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and other major content management systems include integrated caching feature. Cached copy of popular webpages will be stored in the server. However, we should make sure that cache is updated regularly, especially if webpages contain dynamic content. It’s also a good idea to use compression technique. It means that files can be downloaded in compressed format and users are able to obtain what they want faster. Any experienced web developers should be able to easily implement the above techniques.