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Making your audience fall asleep is one of the most important things you need to keep in mind. As a guy who’d played a few shows in my early years, I know for a fact that it goes the same way everywhere. Just as long as you’re presenting content to your audience.

 

When I was younger, there were a lot of shows where our band plays after the more popular bands. And, as you’d imagine, our set will most likely suck. Or worse, there wouldn’t be anyone left to watch us. Sometimes we’d get lucky and we get to play first. But if you set up too slow, people will get bored easily and leave even before strum for your first song. So ideally, you’ve got to have everything you need – your gear and everything else – need to be set up quicker so you can perform your songs. Or your content.

 

The same goes for websites. It wouldn’t matter that your content is really good if your website takes too much time to load. Your users will get bored and leave.

 

Everything today is super quick. If a new iPhone is about to be released, people would want to instantly know the details. People nowadays are constantly looking for news about everything and they want it fast. People today don’t have the patience to wait for your heavy site to load its contents. The time where people wouldn’t move just to have their pictures be painted is now gone.

 

Today, we’ve proved that, if a website loads within 2 seconds or less, people are most likely going to stay and check out your content. If it goes beyond that, three seconds of more, they’ll think that the site had broke or the internet got screwed.

 

What happens when people just turn away from your slow loading site? Business goes down, and your competitors will have the opportunity to take all your customers.

 

For reference, below are the different load speeds and where you might be right now. (not gonna judge)

 

7 seconds and up = Pathetic. You’re doomed.

3 to 7 seconds = You’re still alright. You can still turn your life around.

1 to 3 seconds = Very Good! You were one of the favourite students in your class back in the day

Below 1 second =

 

 

So how will you make your website load faster?

 

Minimize all the HTTP Requests

Hypertext Transfer Protocol requests are counted every time a browser fetches a file, a picture or a page of a website from a web server. It is said that these requests will take up at least 80% of a webpage’s load time. So the more HTTP request you got to load, the longer it takes. To minimize these, you need to:

 

Combine CSS/JS Files

Instead of trying to force browsers to take a lot of CSS or Javascript files to load, you should just combine these CSS files into one larger file. This goes the same for the Javascript files. This might be quite a feat if in case your style sheets and scripts are different from page to page. But if you can pull this off, your load time will definitely improve greatly.

You should use queries to only load what needs to be loaded. Sometimes you notice that you only need to load certain specific images on mobile or on desktop, and using conditional statements to load these things will be a great way to increase the speed. This lets the browser to load only the important scripts or images on specific devices.

 

Try to use less images

Yes, it’s sad. But the truth is, the more images you got and the heavier they are, the more a page slows down on loading. You can still use images, just make sure they’re actually helping out and are related to the content you’ve got. And now that we’re talking about Images…

 

Compress These Images

Ideally, you need to keep your image files below 150KB. There are a lot of compressing software out there so just chill out. Anything bigger than that gives you that weird image-is-still-loading-after-all-the-content-has-already-showed-up type of thing. Frankly, that sucks. It looks unprofessional. And people will agree.

 

This next one sounds like your usual SEO recommendation, Fix all your broken links. – Why? Not only does these pages turn off the good vibes of the visitor, these dead page will 100% suck up extra bandwidth. Which brings us to its partner:

 

Reducing All The Redirects

The logic here is as clear as Kylo Ren’s intentions for a new order to the galaxy. The more time it takes for browsers to arrive to the real destination, the longer the visitor needs to wait. Why not just take out the old pages and just use the current modern page? No redirects = lesser time for loading.

 

 

Much like setting up for your set, it would be better to have things that you can load faster. A really awesome content deserves to be shown quicker.

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