How fast or slow a website opens directly affects the visitor's user experience. The speed at which a website loads depends on several factors, such as whether the server is good or bad, how large or small the network bandwidth is, and how complex or simple the page code is. If you are limited by budget, then speeding up your website by optimizing the page code is a very effective approach.
1. The website's hosting route
Without this prerequisite, no matter how well your website is built, how little content it has, or how powerful the server is, there's no arguing that it may take ages to open, and it may even frequently fail to open. So if we want the website to open fast, we have to lay a solid foundation first; then we can talk about how many floors to build on top. Usually we use China Telecom, China Netcom, or dual-route or triple-route connections. Whichever you choose, as long as it's good and fast, that's what matters.
2. The website needs full-site static generation
This means the page suffix is .html or .php or something else. Why say that? Think about it: with a typical dynamic website, when a page is opened, it must first read data from the database and then display it on the page — it takes a detour, and it is also determined by the speed of database access and by how much data the database holds and how large the database is. It's hard not to be slow. A static page is different: it doesn't need to access the database, because when it was generated, it had already read the database data, and a page was generated from that data — it takes a straight path, so it's hard not to be fast.
3. Compress or streamline JavaScript and CSS code
No matter what type of website it is, every time a user clicks through the site, the site's JavaScript and CSS code is loaded. If this code is redundant and excessive, it will inevitably slow down the website. Put CSS styles in the head, and if there is a lot of JS, put the JS code at the end. This way, the page's DOM structure can be loaded first as much as possible, and only then can there be any user experience to speak of. If there's a lot of JS and the page hasn't even finished loading, how can you talk about user experience?
If you have this problem, you need to compress or streamline the code. For compression, there are plenty of third-party tools, such as the CSS/JS compression tools from Chinaz, which everyone can try free of charge; compressed code can generally be reduced by 40% to 65%. For streamlining, if one style rule can do the job, don't use two — the idea is to satisfy the website's page layout while keeping the amount of code down.
4. Reduce the number of HTTP requests
When a user opens a web page, the back-end program doesn't take much time to respond to what the user needs; the user's waiting time is mainly spent downloading page elements, namely HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, images and so on. Statistics show that for each additional element, web page loading time increases by 25–40 milliseconds (depending on the user's bandwidth). So to improve page opening speed, you need to reduce the number of HTTP requests. There are 3 ways:
1) Reduce unnecessary HTTP requests, for example by using CSS rounded corners instead of rounded-corner images, and by using fewer images.
2) Merge files. For text files, the contents can be merged directly. For example, merge multiple JS (short for JavaScript) files into one, and merge multiple CSS files into one.
3) Optimize caching. For page elements that don't change (such as the page header and footer), there's no need to download them again when the user visits again — they can simply be read from the browser cache.
Put the JavaScript and CSS style sheet files used by the page in a separate folder. That way, when other pages of the website are opened, these referenced files will be cached, thereby speeding up the loading of the website's pages.
Today's web pages all have multiple images, external CSS file links, and external JavaScript script links. So when a web page is visited, the browser needs to request these files from the server multiple times. A considerable time lag arises between requesting and loading. This is especially true for pages with many small images and icon buttons — however many images there are, the browser needs to make that many requests for these small files, and making many requests for these small image files will noticeably affect page loading speed. So we should combine small images into one large PNG image as much as possible, and then display the icons by coordinates. Requesting one large image at a time is considerably faster than requesting many small images. Likewise, it's best to consolidate CSS and JavaScript into as few files as possible, which also helps speed up page loading.
5. Server-side cache settings
Suppose a user visits your website for the first time; the next time the user visits your site, it will be faster. What's the reason? The reason is browser caching.
Most servers or hosting spaces already have the caching function enabled by default. What the webmaster or seoer needs to do is set the corresponding file types and expiration times in the back end. Here, the recommendation is: if it's a windows host, set the cache time for images, CSS and JavaScript files to 30 days; if it's an Apache Web server, use the mod_cache module to enable the caching function.
6. Optimize the images referenced in CSS
Suppose a page needs a large number of peripheral images, such as the icons below. If these images are all called individually, the number of requests will increase, which shows that: with too many cssimages, the number of requests will increase and the website will open more slowly.
If we combine the images the page needs into one image, the number of requests for these images becomes 1, and the page speed will be correspondingly faster. How do you put the needed images on one image and call them at the corresponding positions? The method is coordinate positioning. That is: obtain the image path through CSS coordinates, and reference the corresponding coordinates in the tag.
If you know something about front-end development, none of this is a big problem. If you don't understand CSS, then CSS image merge generator tools (just search for them) can directly provide the corresponding content: merging CSS images and generating the corresponding code at the same time.
7. Image compression
Data shows that image loading time is a factor in website speed; solve the image loading speed problem and you've solved more than half of the page speed problem. Suppose the website has a large number of jpg and other format images; without affecting the visual appearance, compress them as much as possible to reduce the size of the images themselves. Similar to compressing JavaScript files, there are plenty of online tools that provide the corresponding compression services, and plenty of image editing programs such as Meitu Xiuxiu all have compression features.
8. Enable gzip compression on the server side
The smaller each element on a web page is, the less time it takes to download — that's easy to understand. gzip compression is a relatively efficient data compression format. If gzip compression is enabled, the compression rate can generally reach around 75%, which is a very obvious effect. Most servers, such as virtual hosts and VPS, already have this function enabled by default. If it isn't enabled and you don't know how to configure it, it's recommended to contact your hosting provider directly and let them resolve it.
How fast or slow a website opens is a matter of user experience and of how friendly the website appears to search engines. Using every available means to speed up website loading is therefore indispensable. One frequently overlooked issue when improving web page opening speed is responsiveness. For users, every action should get a timely response, regardless of whether the returned result is fast or slow. The most typical example: when a user clicks to open an image, whether there is a progress bar with a percentage number is a classic piece of responsive design.
That's all for "How to Improve Website Response Speed?" — it is provided solely for webmasters' mutual exchange and learning. SEO optimization is a process that requires persistence, and I hope we can all make progress together.
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