How to optimize website assets ?

It can be tempting to think you’re done with your website once it’s launched and you’re all set to get all the brownie points. In order to keep it afloat and compete, there are still a lot of things to do. No matter which device users use to search, they all want a better user experience and faster loading times.

In today’s web development world, the ‘page speed’ of a website is the most important aspect. It is crucial in today’s web-based environment to optimize a website for speed not only to improve its search engine ranking, but also to reduce its bounce rate, improve conversion, and offer a better end-user experience.

As a user, would you prefer a website that loads quickly? I’m sure you’d agree. Listed below are some simple tips for optimizing a website’s page speed. We would also look at what is web optimization and its benefits

What Is Web optimization:

Optimizing your website means improving its performances across various areas, including traffic, conversion rates, and usability. Despite meeting many KPIs and goals, the goal of website optimization is to ensure a seamless digital journey on your website. Thus, it provides the best environment for users to become happy and return to the company. For a website to run smoothly and your content to be relevant and engaging, you need consistency and effort to maintain it. If your organization has multiple websites or a large, complex website, this can seem like a monumental task, which is why we recommend separating it into different areas of website optimization.

Benefits Of Web Optimization

1. An increase in traffic: Increasing traffic to your website through web optimization is one of the most effective ways to do so. The majority of your website’s impressions and clicks will come from the search engines if its results are at the top. Hence, your website will receive a lot of traffic if you are at the top. It is important to create title tags and Meta descriptions that contain informative and keyword-relevant information in order to get your website at top in Search Engines.
2. Enhance User Experience: Whenever you are optimizing your website, you should remember that it is crucial to optimize it for the best results. Making your website easy to navigate and friendly should be one of your top priorities. Providing quick access to information that your visitors need will make their experience much better. If your website is E-Commerce then today deals, and new products should display in landing page. If your Website is Blog application, It should provide a way to  bookmark posts, user will bookmark the posts in the blog and it will help them to see all important posts for them at one place.
3. Effortless marketing: Since web optimization targets people searching online for products and services, it costs less compared to other marketing strategies. Newspaper, TV, and email-based advertising don’t provide the same return on investment as internet advertising.  A website gets more qualified traffic through search engine optimization. With other marketing strategies, you will not get such high traffic with such low prices.
4. Provide What Search Engine Wants: The “Spiders” are search engine programs that automatically scour your site. The “Spider” typically combs through the code of your website. Therefore, when a website is optimized, the HTML code is generally made easier for search engines to parse so that they can index it. It is essential that your website is indexed better and easier if you want to achieve better website rankings.  More targeted traffic means more sales, and better rankings help you gain more traffic.

What are the best ways to check a website’s speed?

You can test your site’s speed with Cloudflare’s free tool. In addition, they provide free CDN services that boost website performance and reduce latency. Website speed tests are also offered by a number of online providers, and you typically only need to paste the URL into the field provided to begin the test. You can also use Chrome Lighthouse feature it will analyze the current webpage and audits the metrics. A sample audit is attached. Lighthouse will also give suggestions for optimizations and best practices to follow.

Metrics from Lighthouse

Tips To Improve Web Optimization

1. Prefetching should be enabled: Prefetching allows a browser to store the information a user is likely to access soon. A user can see the necessary information instantly on their screen after clicking on a link that has been already stored in their browser’s cache.  
2. Provide fast loading times: Have you visited a website that took forever to load in your browser? At what point did your patience run out? There are some websites that require a considerable amount of time before you can see the images because they have large video and graphics files. File sizes should be kept small so visitors don’t have to wait. Despite being a virtue, patience seems hard to find these days. For better user experience, while the assets are loading in the application, instead of showing simple spinner, it is good to show skeleton of the card or frame.
3. Scripts should be placed at the bottom and style sheets at the top: It is beneficial to place style sheets in the head section of a website as it helps it load faster as renders web pages incrementally. A majority of internet browsers allow for simultaneous downloading of two components at once (images, styles, and scripts). Parallel downloads are usually blocked by scripts, which means you cannot download anything until the script has finished downloading.
4. Asynchronous Scripts: Asynchronous loading of scripts will also optimize the loading speed of web pages since scripts are independent of web page loading. The page can now be rendered faster since scripts no longer need to load before rendering. Asynchronously downloaded scripts are executed in the background. In general, asynchronous scripts are safe for third-party services because they tend to become slow or go down frequently.
5. Reduce HTTP requests by combining JavaScript and CSS files: Whenever your website obtains an HTTP or HTTPS web address, it slows down. The more requests you make, the slower your website gets. It is possible to dramatically reduce the number of requests by combining external JS and CSS files. Instead of loading five CSS and five JS files, you can combine the files into one. There would be eight fewer requests as a result.
6. Files should be compressed: There are many code files on a website, including HTML, JS, and CSS. As the page becomes more complex, the loading time will increase. Site responsiveness can be improved by compressing these large code files to their original sizes
7. Prioritize mobile-first Approach: Traditionally, websites from the first generation were viewed on desktop computers with a large screen. Most people visit websites using mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops today. Therefore, your website should be mobile-friendly. Also, you should make sure every aspect of your site – the search, shopping cart, and checkout – can be accessed from a mobile device just as easily as from a desktop or laptop computer.
8. Make use of web caching: Caches are temporary storage areas where browsers save copies of static files in order to load recently viewed pages faster rather than continuously requesting the same content via HTTP. Browsers can be instructed to cache elements of a webpage that won’t change frequently by developers. In the headers of an HTTP response, a hosting server includes caching instructions. Those who use certain pages frequently will benefit from quicker loading times since the server transfers less data to the browser.  
9. Utilize a CDN service: Content delivery networks (CDNs) boost website load speed by caching content in many different places around the world. Cache servers of a CDN are typically located closer to end-users than the origin or host server. In place of directly connecting to the hosting server, which may be hundreds of miles away and connected to numerous autonomous networks, requests for material are sent through a CDN server instead. CDN servers can dramatically improve the performance of websites.
10. Reduce HTTP requests: Typically, browsers will make multiple HTTP requests in order to access the page’s various assets such as images, scripts, and CSS files. Hundreds of requests may be necessary for a single website. There is a round trip between the web browser and the server hosting the resource for each request, which adds to the load time for a page. In addition, the webpage might not be able to load quickly if one of the hosts crashes. A minimal number of assets should be loaded on each page due to these potential issues. Speed tests will also reveal which HTTP requests are taking the longest. Developers can look for a faster image hosting solution if images are causing a page to load slowly

Conclusion: The list above demonstrates how you can optimize your website performance in numerous ways to give your content better delivery and increase its speed.  Among these are optimizing images, implementing a CDN, implementing browser and server caching, and reducing HTTP requests.