7 tips for boosting your site's loading speed

What are the reasons for wanting to speed up the loading of a site? Improving the loading speed of a website has become a crucial criterion for ensuring its success. Online users are increasingly impatient and demand fast access to your site. What's more, with the rise in the use of mobile devices for browsing the Internet, which benefit from a less stable and reliable connection, this optimisation is even more important. Optimising loading speed has a significant impact on the time taken to connect to your site, the number of pages consulted, the conversion rate and your SEO ranking.

It's common to try and save money on all the costs associated with running a website. While this is laudable, it is important to be discerning. One of the most important costs is web hosting. Although some web hosts offer low-cost hosting solutions, you need to allocate an appropriate budget to this aspect. This guarantees access to a dedicated server rather than a shared server.

Shared hosting consists of storing several websites on the same server, which means that server performance is shared between all these sites. This has a negative impact on website performance and loading times. It is therefore advisable to opt for a dedicated server to optimise web page load times. Although this represents an additional investment of a few dozen euros, it can be extremely cost-effective.

Optimise the download time for HTML, CSS and JavaScript code by activating GZIP compression. This technique reduces the size of these files by compressing them. In practice, users won't even notice the difference, as popular browsers such as Chrome, Safari and Firefox fully support GZIP compression. There are several ways of activating this compression on a CMS such as WordPress. You can also use tools such as Check GZIP Compression to test whether compression is enabled on your website.

Caching resources has the advantage of reducing the number of elements that need to be loaded for users. The browser stores certain elements of your site that do not need to be reloaded on subsequent visits. This makes browsing easier and speeds up page loading. In the event of changes or updates to the page, only the new elements are downloaded, while the rest are stored in the browser cache.

Reduce the size and weight of an application or web page by minifying its code. This technique applies to JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Minification consists of simplifying elements of the code that are not essential to its understanding, such as comments and optional formatting (line breaks, spaces, etc.).

The result is lighter code and a smaller web page, which means the site loads faster. The code becomes mainly machine-readable, while being almost illegible to humans. Find out how to minify your CSS, HTML and JavaScript files using minification tools or plugins. This will enable you to optimise your site's performance.

When a web page takes a long time to load completely, it is beneficial to give priority to the content at the top of the page. This way, users can start viewing content above the waterline as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the rest of the page will load in the background, allowing users to read the content already available. This approach ensures that users at least have something to see, reducing the risk of a high bounce rate. To achieve this, make sure that the content at the top of the page is placed at the beginning of the HTML code.

A heavy, slow-loading web page is often the result of media files that are too large. Optimising media files means reducing their size. Although the quality of modern cameras is impressive, it results in the creation of extremely large files. Users, particularly on mobile devices, may find it difficult to access this content quickly without a step to reduce file size. Most of the time, media content, such as photos and videos, do not need to have such a high resolution (72 dpi for the web).

To reduce the weight of a video on a website, you can follow these tips:

CDN (Content Delivery Network) technology can be extremely beneficial in speeding up the loading of your website. This network is made up of multiple computers in different locations around the world, working together to deliver content faster.

When a user is geographically close to the server, the site loads faster. This strategic geographical distribution allows information to be stored in appropriate locations, so that content is accessible as close as possible to the user, thus improving browsing. However, this option is particularly useful for sites with an international audience and larger budgets.

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