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15 effective ways to speed up your website in 2023

Slow page speed is a big issue for any website. It makes a bad impact on SEO, and also acquires bad user experiences. Are you facing such problems with your website?

If the answer is yes, then I request you not to be worried. Because here I put almost everything that can help you to boost up your website speed.

effective ways to speed up your website

Effective ways to speed up your website 

1. Minimize HTTP requests

An HTTP request is an intermediary process between a client/application and a server. In this process, the client submits an HTTP request to the server, after getting that request the server internalizes the message and sends back a response.

An HTTP request is divided into three parts, those are request line, header, and body. The most commonly-used HTTP methods are POST, GET, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. These methods are used to perform create, read, update, and delete operations. More HTTP header requests make more delays to load pages.

2. Reduce External HTTP Requests

External HTTP request works as HTTP API. External HTTP request refers to the system where header requests go to an external server by linking them using API. It takes more time to load pages compare to internal server response. 

3. Minify CSS and JS files

By minifying CSS and JS files, you can reduce a large amount size from the total file size. It will take less time to load your minified files. There are so many code minifier available online, you can choose one of them.

But please keep a separate backup file before making minified version. Because you cannot give it back the previous position after minified. But there are also code beautifiers or maxifiers also available online to extend your codes.

4. Compress your website with gzip

Gzip is the most popular compression method. It is used to compress mostly on code and text files. Gzip can reduce the file size of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML up to 90%. Such type of compression helps to boost up website speed.

You should set up gzip mechanism on your .htaccess file located on the root directory of your website. Please enable to show the dot file to edit .htaccess, because dot files are usually hidden on some system. 

5. Use a CDN

CDN or content delivery network provides extra first website loading speed by enabling caching system. When lots of users visit a particular dynamic page, it makes so frequent header requests. It consumes more bandwidth and can make the server slower.

CDN can easily solve this problem by creating static pages from dynamic ones. The only problem you face with this system is it doesn't allow immediate updates. After updating your content on the server you should have to wait for a certain time to get it updated on both CDN.

It is a relatively little problem because CDN boosts up website speed many times faster.

6. Reduce redirects

What happened when you make a redirection within your website? It opens a new page from the page you opened first. The first opened page usually makes header requesters that are necessary, and while it redirects you to another page then the new page again asks for header requests.

So what will be the final result? To visit a single page makes multiple times header requests than usual. So it makes extra time to load a particular page that is redirected. 

7. Fix all broken links

Broken links can greatly reduce your website performance. If you optimized your site for 404 pages, then broken links within your website may tend to redirect 404. First of all, redirection makes your website slower here.

Secondly, broken links sometimes try to find out a potential solution to get the desired path, which takes a long time to respond. Overall, it makes a bad user experience in different ways. 

8. Put CSS at the top and JS at the bottom

Link your CSS files on the top of your web pages because they need to link before your defined CSS classes and ids. But you can put your JavaScript files on the bottom, and you should do it. Because your webpage starts loading from the top and ends up with the bottom.

In the meantime, it loads everything within the page and within the linked files. Call as much fewer files as possible before your visual content, it will make a delay to print your page on the browser.

9. Use external hosting platforms

If you want to host large files like videos and audio, then you should use external hosting instead of your personal hosting server. What does it mean by an external hosting server? Here external hosting refers to the server where you can upload your files and link to your content page as embedded content.

For example, you can upload videos on YouTube to make an embedded link on your website. It will use hosted servers' bandwidth, as a result, you will get a faster page speed because such free hosted sites are using super-powerful servers.

10. Enable browser caching

Browser caching refers to the stored files from a website. When a visitor visits a website then the website automatically stores some files like images, CSS and JS. As a result, the files don't need to be loaded from the server when the same visitor visits the same webpage using the same browser.

But you need to enable the system first. You can set it through the .htaccess file, where you can set a particular expiring time. This caching system greatly improves the page speed and reduces bandwidth a lot.

11. Reduce image sizes

Your webpage counts every bite to load. So try to reduce all of your files and images as much possible as you can. Basically, image files could be larger than any other file size. So give an extra focus on it. Make compress your image using a different image editor or image compressor.

Lots of image compressors are available online, you can choose one of them. But Google recommends using the webp image version to reduce image size. I also use it for myself, it really works great.

There are also image converters available online. You can convert your jpg or png image extensions to webp extensions.

12. Prevent image hotlinking

Hotlinking is the process where someone links images within his web content from an external server. Hosting on an external server is not always good, only use it for big files and reliable external servers.

Adding videos from YouTube follows the embedded process, but hotlinking makes direct external links to images. It makes slows down the web page loading speed. 

13. Split large content into pages

Large informative content is good for SEO, but if your content is super large, it can reduce the value. Large content is hard to scroll, and it can make your page slower to scroll. So keep it perfectly shot by splitting a single content into different pages. Use pagination with exact numbers to make it easily navigate. 

14. Remove Unnecessary Plugins, Addons, and Extensions

Every time you add a new plugin or addon, it also adds some CSS and JS files that can be large or small. So it is a wise decision not to use so many plugins on your website. Reduce the number by removing unnecessary plugins. Unauthorized plugins sometimes make a lot of security issues. 

15. Remove Social Sharing Buttons on Website

The social sharing button has no additional value for your website performance. These buttons are only helpful while you make more and more shareable content.

Use your customized share buttons because some organizations offer a bunch of social share buttons that include JS files. External JS files will make your website extra slower, so please avoid those.  

Final thought

I hope this guide will help you to make your website high speedy. You have to keep your mind that high speed is not your main intention, a good user experience is the key fact here. So try to attract your audiences in different ways. 

You should provide quality content and make a professional environment overall. If you are able to maintain everything well, then website speed will give you extra fuel. 

Tarikul islam

About Torikul islam

Torikul islam is a professional web developer and affiliate marketer. Join Torikul to learn how to start a website and operate it well. He started his Web Developement career from Bangladesh Association of Software and Information (BASIS) in 2015. Later he continiued his journey to expanding knowledge and sharing it with others.

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