Four ways to speed up your website

Website speed is a crucial part of website design that is often
surprisingly neglected. According to, theedesign.com the majority of users
expect web pages to load in at least 2 seconds and web traffic will drop
by around 40% if speeds are over 3 seconds. Don’t underestimate the
importance of speed to provide a better user experience, in turn driving
increased engagement and higher conversion rates.

Minify

Minifying is a simple process that removes all the unneeded information
from code, such as line breaks, spaces, comments, etc. These characters
increase file size unnecessarily, increasing website load time. The
only downside is that it makes the code harder to read for developers.
However, the solution is to unminify the code when developing and minify
again when finished.

Example of unminified code:

var array =
[];
for (var i = 0; i < 20; i++){
array[i];
}

Example of minified code:

for(var
array=[],i=0;i<20;i++)array[i];

Storing files locally

There are pros and cons to both CDN and storing files locally. If your
website can’t access the CDN link, then it might not load correctly, but
if you save files locally, they cannot be updated by the original owner,
meaning redownloading any updates. Regarding speed, CDN is undoubtedly
faster; this is because end users connect to the nearest CDN server,
instead of waiting to receive their request directly from the source.

WebP

WebP is an image format that uses both lossy and lossless compression,
with the ability to produce much smaller files than JPEG and PNG with
little difference in image quality. According to Google Google WebP images are 26% smaller than PNG
and 25-34% smaller than JPEG.

Increase your website speed significantly by using WebP over JPEG or
PNG. However, at the moment the only major web browsers that support
WebP are Google Chrome and Opera. It is, therefore, best to implement
fallbacks to these formats, if the user’s browser does not support WebP.

Data URI

Another optimisation tip is to use Data URIs. Usually, elements such as
images and style sheets make multiple hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP)
requests. Data URIs, on the other hand, allows data to be included
directly within the web page, meaning they don’t need to make an
additional request to fetch the resource.

The fewer HTTP requests that you run, the faster the website will be since it doesn’t need to load as
many files. The size of Data URI strings do end up being larger than
average but will be quicker since you are only downloading one HTTP
request as opposed to many. All major browsers support data URIs.

Example Data URI string:

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