6 Tips to Speed Up Your Website 

6 Tips to Speed Up Your Website
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Little loading animation is eye-catching and everyone loves it. But if it lasts more than a second or two, it will give an impression that the website is loading slowly, and ultimately prove to be a website killer. 

From a user perspective, websites should load quickly and efficiently. You have to make sure that the design is not only visually pleasing but also 100 percent functional. If you are worried and your site is dragging somewhat, then here is the solution. By having the following tips in mind, you can speed up your website with small tweaks to the design. 

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Add Interactive Animations

In website designing, animations have been trending for quite a few years. In the beginning, start with smaller animated touches. Then move on to bigger animations as you feel good about how they work and how they will impact your overall website framework.

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Animation is not about loading a bunch of video files to your website. Your focus should be on smaller animations. Because it is easy to create something with a tiny footprint. So how you can take your first step?

Focus on something simple and fun. You may create an animated hover state. Before moving on to larger elements, you should know that having a button change color or expand is a skillful effect that will help you become proficient in the CSS and get a good sense of basic animation. AJAX or parallax loading animations is also another option you may consider. These options will provide you space to add elements without the user even noticing them. You will get everything ready because elements load as users scroll.

Focus On The Theme

Keep in mind that all themes are not built the same. So you have to be careful if you are using WordPress or another content management system with a theme. By having a premium option it will let you “turn off” unused elements – take a direct look at the code and set it up to make sure that’s not the thing that stalled your site down.

Watch Your Plugins

If you have a ton of plugins and you are not using them actively to optimize efficiency, make sure to turn off unused plugins. For a WordPress user who wants to know what plugins are active and how they are working, he can take advantage of the Plugin Performance Profiler. By this, he can remove or reconfigure those plugins and it also proves helpful to troubleshoot and identify problems. (Social sharing plugins seem to be a common problem.)

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Use Code Where You Can

Sometimes you might be convinced to create a bunch of skillful icons and images for your website and load each as a separate element. This may cause some issues. To avoid this, use code to call these elements when possible. 

To load background images using CSS. Users will be able to see other elements and text on the site right away. As it will “force” your site to load everything else ahead of the background.

Keep Videos Short

The use of full-screen video on your homepage is also another trendy website design element. This can be another load time trap. You might find yourself caught between video content, video quality, and speed and will have to make a sacrifice somewhere.

Videos that are super short  – only a couple of seconds – prove to be the best videos and loop so that the action does not stop. Due to this, you don’t have to include sound or other effects either.

To make your file size down as much as possible, you can try a few other tricks.

  • Think of a video that is less than the full screen in size.
  • Ditch the autoplay, it will make users think that your site loads quicker than it is.
  • If you want to show multiple video clips, then don’t get stuck with long videos. Use the video “slider” element so that users will not get bored whenever they visit the site. (Don’t sacrifice load time for longer clips because only a few users will watch more than a few seconds.)

Compression Is the Key

To keep a website running quickly, make your website compress also in addition to the individual components of your website. Elements that can be compressed are the  JavaScript files and CSS, images, and video (by resizing), and the site as a whole using a tool such as GZIP.

For plugins and creating smaller files, minified files are the best route. To have the maximum speed, JavaScript should be restrained in one file and all the CSS should be held in one other file. 

Conclusion

If your site is not loading quickly, it’s time to tweak it to meet the optimum load time. (Still, If you have to think about this question at all, then your site is probably not fast enough.)

Users will abandon that site altogether which takes too long for the page to load. Regardless of the device, Websites have to be quick so that users can interact immediately. Make sure to go through the list to ensure that your site is performing at an optimal level.