The website speed or page load time is a important factor to increase your website performance. Increasing the website speed is very critical today. It is not just to ranking high in Google and Bing, but to keep your profits high. So today, I will cover and share all of the best ways that speedup your website and improve its performance.
Enable Browser Caching
Browser cache stores commonly used files from your website on your visitors browser and because of this it reduces the load on your web server. There fore it increases the page load times for repeat visitors.
How to enable browser caching via .htaccess file:
Create a .htaccess file in the root of your domain and add the below code in that file and save it. You can change the expiry dates depending on your websites files.
## EXPIRES CACHING ## <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 month" ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days" </IfModule> ## EXPIRES CACHING ##
Enable Gzip compression
In Gzip compression technique, it locates similar strings within a text file (css and html) and replaces those strings temporarily to make the overall file size smaller. Gzip compression reduce the size of files sent from your server by 70%. So you can feel the speed in your browser.
How to enable Gzip compression via .htaccess file:
In your .htaccess file, add the below code in that file and save it. You can change the expiry dates depending on your websites files.
<IfModule mod_deflate.c> # Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml # Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers) BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html Header append Vary User-Agent </IfModule>
Optimize your images
Keep your images as small as possible. Use png and jpeg image formats and avoid gif,bmp and tiff formats.Use photoshop or any other image manipulation software and save images for web to reduce the image size with good image quality. Avoid empty image src in the html codes.Always mention the src attribute in your coding.
Minimize the number of HTTP requests
If you have more HTTP requests in your page then it will increase the page load time. To reduce the number of HTTP requests, combine CSS files, merge Javascript files, and combine images in data sprites.
Disable hotlinking of images
Hotlinking means that other sites direct link to the images on your site and that makes your server load high. Use the below .htaccess code to disable hotlinking of jpg,jpeg,png,gif images. Here you can replace connectwww.com with your own domain. And you can replace the hotlinking of images with your own default image. Just change https://connectwww.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/logo-2.png with your own image url.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?connectwww.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ https://connectwww.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/logo-2.png [NC,R,L]
Enabled KeepAlive
KeepAlive allow the same TCP connection for HTTP instead of opening a new connection for each new request. This helps to increase the page load time.Just add the below 3 line of code at your .htaccess file to enable keepalive.
<ifModule mod_headers.c> Header set Connection keep-alive </ifModule>
Minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Minify is the process of eliminate extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation in your code. Just google about HTML, CSS and JavaScript minify and you will get lot of free minification tools.
Put your JavaScript files to the footer
Place all your JavaScript files in the footer of your webpage.This allow browsers to start loading the content first and then it downloads the JavaScript files.
