How to Enhance Page Load Times

Improving the loading time of your web page is indeed a challenging venture. Each web page carves a niche for its uniqueness and appeals to various audiences. Optimization procedures that work well for websites with a worldwide audience can also have a negative impact for websites with a localized audience. Websites with less number of images will benefit largely from some procedures while websites with more images will benefit from some other. Let us now take a look at some of the options using which you can improve page load times: Lowering the Number of Sub-Requests rnThe fewer the sub-requests are, the more are the chances of getting faster loading pages. This doesn’t necessarily imply that you’ll have to redesign your web page all over again and remove the images. After all, the images give your website a more professional look and often help you get more customers. Hence, instead of removing the images you can reduce their file sizes and resolution. There are four essential formats to select from while optimizing images. Each format saves as well as compresses image details differently. The primary formats include JPEG, GIF, PNG-24 and PNG-8. Bundling and Streamlining CSS and JavaScript files When external resources such as JavaScript and CSS files are loaded using individual http requests then it referred to as streamlining. This is an efficient optimization for workloads which have a fewer number of page views per visitor. Some websites may take a hit in terms of performance as their visitors usually view too many pages. But then, once you streamline these resources they cannot be cached on successive page views. On the other hand, by bundling individual JavaScript and CSS files into one file, you may still cache the resources while lowering the number of http requests and enhancing loading time of the page. rnHTTP Compression HTTP Compression is defined as a feature of the HTTP protocol. Using this feature you can adequately configure web servers for compressing data to browsers. Generally, CSS, HTML as well as JavaScript will compress to 75-95% of its initial size. This may save a huge bandwidth for high volume websites and help you with a faster loading web page. HTTP Caching HTTP Caching is defined as a feature of the HTTP protocol using which you can adequately configured web servers for instructing web browsers to save copies of resources on their local system. The next time any request is made for the similar resource, the web browser will make use of the local copy rather than try to retrieve the resource from the web servers. It is true that this step may not help with the primary page view from a visitor, but then it may drastically lower the loading time of successive page views. Using Content Delivery Network The idea behind a CDN is easy. Cache as well as server cacheable content are usually located close to the end-user’s location. The best part about this network is that it helps you with faster loading pages, irrespective of the location from where you are accessing a web page.