In today’s digital world, your website is the face of your business. Having a good website helps form a good first impression on the customer. It is important that your website is both aesthetically pleasing and has good functionality. How fast your website loads has tremendous importance in positioning yourself as an industry leader. This is why it is important to understand the secrets of high-performance websites.

Minimize HTTP requests

Each unique object in your webpage requires an HTTP request and a reply. As such, each extra object adds to the delay in the loading time of a website. By minimizing the number of objects, you can minimize the number of HTTP requests, which in turn improves the loading speed. One strategy to minimize HTTP requests is to use CSS techniques to style headers and other graphics or add spacing between cells. You can also decrease HTTP requests by combining adjacent images to one composite image, combining files in the head of an HTML document, and combining external CSS and Javascript files on the server.

Optimize Images and Multimedia

We all like high-resolution images on web pages. However, this results in slow web pages and more loading time. One strategy to deal with this issue is to crop and resize images on your websites to show only the most relevant parts of an image. Using CSS Borders instead of embedding borders in images can also help. Whenever appropriate, try to replace GIFs and JPEG images with PNG images to decrease the image size. Similar to images, websites can also optimize multimedia to decrease loading time. Reducing frame rates is one of the main strategies used by high-quality websites to decrease loading time. However, be careful not to decrease frame rates any less than 15fps, as it could cause users to perceive them as lower quality.

Optimize JavaScript for Speed

Replacing the majority of Javascript with CSS and optimizing the remaining can minimize the size, thus reducing the loading time of your website. You can also rewrite your scripts with less amount of code to accomplish the same objective. Your website can also use a JavaScript profiler to accurately determine performance bottlenecks. You can also try strategies such as compressing external JavaScript files and using build-in functions wherever possible. Avoid using external JavaScripts referenced in the head because they can cause a delay in the display of the webpage’s content.

Replace inline styles with CSS

Inline styles, font tags, and non-breaking spacing can bulk up your code and make your website inefficient. One of the strategies to reduce bandwidth and ultimately decrease the loading time of a website is to replace inline style with CSS rules. This strategy can significantly simplify your HTML and decrease loading time.

Minimize Initial Display Time

Another strategy high-performing websites use is to hook in users by loading all the useful content fast. Take, for example, a blog a user visits for a piece of particular written information. Even if the images or other elements in the blog take a while to load, the user doesn’t mind.