Website download time and SEO have the same relation as a customer and retail store has got. Imagine you go to your favourite retail store to buy monthly grocery but you find that it takes long time to get your items billed and ultimately it takes more time for you reach home back. Whereas your friend uses an automatic checkout store where he can straight go to the counter and get the items billed and checkout with the help of an automatic machine. It saves time and your friend pays the same price as you do. Now it’s obvious that next month you will join your friend when it comes to buy monthly grocery.
Same way when your customers come online to visit your website, they wish that your site downloads faster and thus they can have a quick and smooth experience. This will make your website more user-friendly and helps to bring in more traffic. In this article I have mentioned few tips which new folks having websites can follow. Following are tips which can influence your website’s downloading time:
1. Use compressing software applications like GZip which helps to compress your server files. This helps in increasing transfer of data per user.
2. Graphic and Design files to be resized and compressed. Using tools like OptiPNG you can optimize the size of your PNG images used in websites. There are many other tools also available like Libjpeg which helps is optimizing Jpeg images. You can also use options like having Sprites and Paralleling request. These will help in downloading the images in a quicker way and thus helping your website to download faster.
3. Minifying CSS and JavaScript files can also help your website to download faster. This will remove the unwanted line breaks and spaces from your files helping you to save few bytes.
4. Caching is another good way to save some bandwidth and making downloading the site faster. Caching is a technique where resources like images and scripts are reserved for the returning visitors of website. Ideally, you can keep the cache-time limit for more than 30 days.
5. Use Cookieless Domain to serve your static content of the website. This helps you to avoid cookies to be transferred every time there is a request on your site. You can call all images, CSS and JavaScript of your website from a cookieless domain.
I hope the above mentioned tips might help you in making your website to download faster. Apart from these, use tools like Page Speed and YSlow which evaluates the web pages of your website and gives suggestions to improve the downloading time.
