Simple Factors on How to Optimize Your Website

Websites that are not optimized properly have huge issues getting conversions. Moreover, there are countless competitors for products similar to the ones that you’re selling. Good optimization will improve your SEO and also your users’ experience, which will boost sales and clickthroughs, and enable you to better meet your KPIs.

Why Site Optimization is Important

1. A non-optimized site will load slowly, which hurts your conversion rates. Google data shows that users expect a site to load in three seconds or less, and 90% of them will be gone if there’s nothing onscreen in five seconds. That same study puts the average mobile load time at 23 seconds.
2. Google likes well-optimized sites, and making sure everything is in order will give you a major search engine bump.

How Can You Measure Your Speed?

1. Pingdom Tools
2. GTMetrix

Okay, So How Do I Optimize My Site?

Layout and design

1. Use less images—focus instead of using colours and other simpler design elements. A little bit of clever CSS goes a long way. Speaking of:
2. Use CSS font icons rather than images for increased speed and reduced stress on your server.
3. Use up-to-date languages such as HTML5 and CSS3.

HTML optimization

1. Do not have any unnecessary data in your HTML and CSS files.
2. Merge your CSS styles into a single file. This will reduce requests and improve your load times.
3. Combine smaller images into one using CSS sprites.
4. Use images in JPG format than PNG format.
5. You should optimize all your images by using photoshop. There are also a couple of sites on the web that you can help you like https://tinypng.com/, https://kraken.io/.
6. Make sure you always include external CSS before external JavaScript. And try to avoid CSS @import.
7. All your external resources should be present at their path. Make sure there are no missing files.
8. Instead of resizing images with CSS, reduce the original image’s dimensions with Photoshop.

Things to be Done After Web Hosting

1. You can purchase a CDN (Content Delivery Network) service from MaxCDN, Amazon CloudFront etc. and upload your static components on their CDN.
2. Write the following rules into your .htaccess file:

To enable keep-alive:

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Connection keep-alive
</ifModule>

For Enable gzip compression:

<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rsp header ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>

For Force no caching for dynamic files:

<filesMatch ".(php|cgi|pl|htm)$">

ExpiresDefault A0

Header set Cache-Control "no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0"

Header set Pragma "no-cache"

</filesMatch>

</ifModule>