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 quick access to your site. Moreover, with the rise of the use of mobile devices to browse the Internet, which benefit from a less stable and reliable connection, this optimization takes on even greater importance. Optimizing the loading speed has a significant impact on the connection time to your site, the number of pages viewed, the conversion rate, as well as on SEO natural referencing.

Allocate an adequate budget for web hosting

It is common to seek to save on all expenses related to the management of a website. While this is commendable, it is important to exercise good judgment. Indeed, one of the essential expenses concerns web hosting. Although some hosts offer low-cost hosting solutions, it is necessary to allocate a proper budget for 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 leads to a distribution of server performance between all these sites. This situation has a negative impact on the performance and loading time of the website. Thus, opting for a dedicated server is recommended in order to optimize the loading time of web pages. Although this represents an additional investment of a few tens of euros, it can be extremely profitable.

Set up GZIP compression.

Optimize the download time of HTML, CSS and JavaScript code by enabling GZIP compression. This technique makes it possible to reduce the size of these files by compressing them. In practice, users do not even notice the difference, since popular browsers such as Chrome, Safari and Firefox fully support GZIP compression. There are several methods to enable this compression on a CMS such as WordPress. You can also use tools like Check GZIP Compression to test whether compression is enabled on your website.

Enable resource caching to improve performance

Resource caching has the advantage of reducing the amount of items for users to load. The browser stores certain elements of your site that do not need to be reloaded on subsequent visits. This practice facilitates navigation and speeds up the loading of pages. In the event of changes or updates to the page, only the new elements are downloaded, while the rest is kept in the browser's cache.

Optimize your CSS and JavaScript files by minifying them.

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 the elements of the code that are not essential for its understanding, such as comments and optional layout (line breaks, spaces, etc.).

The result is leaner code and a smaller web page, which translates to faster site load times. The code becomes mostly machine-readable, while being nearly unreadable to humans. Learn how to minify your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files with minification tools or plugins. This will allow you to optimize the performance of your site.

Optimize content display by placing priority on the top of the page.

When a web page takes a long time to fully load, it is beneficial to prioritize the content at the top of the page. This will allow viewers to start viewing content above the fold as soon as possible. During this time, the rest of the page will load in the background, allowing users to read the content already available. This approach ensures that people will have at least something to see, reducing the risk of a high bounce rate. To do this, make sure that the top content of the page is placed at the beginning of the HTML code.

Optimized media files for improved performance

A heavy and slow-loading web page is often the result of overly large media files. Optimizing media files consists in reducing their weight. Although the quality of modern cameras and cameras is impressive, it leads to the creation of extremely large files. Users, especially on mobile devices, may find it difficult to quickly access this content without a file size reduction step. Most of the time, media content, such as photos and videos, doesn't need to be as high resolution (72 dpi for the web).

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

  • Host the video on platforms like Youtube or Videomo and embed them on your site.
  • Reduce the width of the video.
  • Compress the video using software such as Adobe Premiere.
  • Remove the audio track if not needed.
  • Choose the right format: MP4 is generally the lightest format.
  • By optimizing your media files according to these recommendations, you can improve the performance of your website.

Improve the loading speed of your website by using a CDN

CDN (Content Delivery Network) technology can be extremely beneficial in making your website load faster. 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 the content is accessible as close as possible to the user, thus improving navigation. However, this option is particularly useful for sites with an international audience and larger budgets.

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