How important is a fast loading website is?

A good website should have many attributes and speed is one of the attribute.

Below is a list of ways to make a fast loading website:

1. Evaluate your plugins

Outdated plugins are one of the main causes of slow websites. Poor or outdated plugins slows down performance dramatically. To fix this menace you should ensure that the plugins are up to date and remove obsolete plugins. This will help to improve your website performance.

2. Enable compression

In website designing, You can also compress the amount of data on a website so as to reduce the amount of bytes sent across the network that will allow good performance of a website. You can apply some compression algorithms like GZIP to compress the data on your website.

3. Use a content delivery network

A CDN takes a website static files such as images and java script and delivers them on servers that are close to the user’s physical location. Since the servers are close to the user, they load more quickly and this will enable good performance of a website.

4. Reduce the image size and formats

Survey has shown that most of the bulk of a website weighs on a desktop computers is images. Adoption of new image formats that have fewer bytes will help enable the faster running of a website.

5. Minimize on java script and css

Removing of non-essential lines breaks, extra space, and so on, you will speed up parsing, downloading and executing. This will help cut of some bytes of data from a web page.

6. Combining images with css sprites

Sprites help to combine all background images into one single image . The proper image segment will be displayed because of the css background –image and background –position properties. CSS sprites reduce delays caused by roundtrips made as the server is downloading other resources. This combined with other factors will improve the performance of a website.

7. Cache

Browser cache stores data of resources, a process that quickens Page and speed tremendously and reduces server lag. When a user visits a page on your website, the cached version will usually be served unless it has changed since it was last cached; this saves a lot of requests to your server and as a result makes fast loading website.

Conclusion
A fast website is equally as important as the information that is on that website. Website developers should consider the above listed ideas to enable a fast running websites that will attract more people to view their websites.