Today, Internet has reached to more than 5 billion people across the world - 61 percent of the global population. And of this total, 92.8 percent (4.32 billion) accessed the internet via mobile devices. The figures above clearly indicate how crucial is the speed and performance of your website for the success of your business.

Here, in this article I am writing about how can you optimize your web performance. But before knowing "HOW?", let's find out "WHAT & WHY?".

What really is web performance and why do you need it?

Web performance means how quickly your site content loads and renders in a web browser, and how well it responds to user interaction. Bad performing sites are slow to display and slow to respond to input. Bad performing sites increase site abandonment . At its worst, bad performance causes content to be completely inaccessible. Therefore, reducing your bottom line and ranking on search engines as well.

5 Methods To Increase Your Web Performance :

1. Choose the right hosting:

Every hosting provider offers a different baseline performance out of the box. Moreover, you usually can’t compare the performance of a web host’s shared plans with more advanced offerings such as dedicated servers.

Ideally, you want to use a web host that offers excellent performance across the board. Every web hosting provider will tell you that it’s the fastest, so it’s your job to compare features and prices and to read as many reviews as possible before you make a decision.

And if you are not tight on budget, always choose a dedicated server plan or VPS.

2. Leverage browser caching:

Caching is one of the most critical steps to improving your site’s loading times. By enabling browser caching, you tell your visitors’ browsers to store some (or all) of your site’s static files on their computers temporarily. Since those visitors won’t need to reload your site fully every time they return, loading times should be much faster on subsequent visits. You can read in-depth about it here .

3. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN):

On most types of hosting (except cloud hosting), your website resides in a single server with a specific location. Every visitor needs to connect to that server in order to load your website, which can lead to bottlenecks. CDNs are pool of servers around the world that store copies of websites. That means, for example, your site can be hosted in the US but use a CDN with servers in Latin America, India, and the rest of the world. If someone from Brazil tries to visit your site, that CDN will serve your site from its Latin American servers.

4. Minify Your Website's Scripts:

Most modern websites come with multiple CSS and JavaScript files. Each additional script your site needs to load has an impact on its performance. In most cases, removing that code isn’t an option, since it usually enables you to add critical features to your site. What you can do is minify those scripts. Minification is a simple process that involves removing unnecessary characters from your site’s code.

5. Put CSS at the Top and JavaScript at the Bottom

By “top” and “bottom”, I mean the head and footer sections within your pages’ HTML documents. When you visit a website, your browser has to load all of the scripts within the head tags before it can render the rest of the page. That’s not a problem with CSS, because those files contain the markup language that enables you to style your website. If you remove your CSS files or block them from rendering, your site will still work, but it probably won’t look very good.

JavaScript, on the other hand, usually isn’t critical when it comes to rendering pages. For example, you might have code that enables analytics on your site or powers an email submission form. You can move that code to your HTML document’s footer (or just before the end of the body tag), and those functions will still work once the page finishes loading.

This practice is called as deferring JavaScript loading. The result is that your website will still work just the same, but it will start rendering faster because browsers don’t need to finish loading all that JavaScript before they start showing your content.

I hope you find this article helpful :)