Why is my web application loading slower? A beginner’s guide to website optimization  

Hello, wonderful Soutech Readers, I want to talk about a topic that every internet users and website developers don’t love to experience: Yes, Website loading slower. How often do you visit a website and you have to go for a cup of coffee before the website will load all its content. Even many websites will still just be rolling like a dancing ball for more than 10 minutes without displaying a single content on the screen.

Back in the days of cyber café browsing, I remembered how I will be praying to God to please load up the webpages I was visiting so that my airtime will not be used solely on that website. I didn’t feel the pain of the website developer when I was using their website until I started developing my own website.

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If Soutech Web Consult can achieve a tremendous result on www.soutechventures.com on its page load, then all our readers can achieve such result as well.

This article was divided into subsections for each optimization, and you can easily navigate to the ones that interest you most but nearly all of them are needed when targeting faster website page loading.

As an expert in website optimization, I am really sure that if you follow all the points’ one after the other, then, you will see wonderful results.

1. IMAGES AND PICTURES

As a beginner web-developer, many of them don’t really pay attention to the power of image optimization. All they always go for is to have high-quality images to the website that they are developing so that it will look professional but they didn’t check to see the side effects on the website page’s load time. The only thing to optimize the images is to compress them so that they will be faster to load when the website picks it up.

When all web developers looking into past websites, they would have the intuition to make it work faster but the next question coming out of their mouth is “What service can I use to compress my images?”.

Optimizilla is an online web platform that enables web developers to upload images, select the level of compression that suits them and then downloads the compressed image for use in the optimization. Many times, I have seen the size of images decreases to 70% which makes the website to load faster.

Are you that person who doesn’t like online stuff due to your internet usage, then the following desktop applications are available for you……

ImageOptim for Mac or FileOptimizer for Windows.

Filetype also matters when looking into website optimization because jpg loads faster on the website but when you looking into transparency, png images will be the better option since it can be blended into the background.

2. VIDEOS

Are you planning to use videos on your website but you are afraid of reducing the speed of the website right? Then I will suggest a solution that nearly all the popular websites are using.

Embedding the videos into your website is the solution since you can upload it into video sharing platforms like youtube, Vimeo that permits users to embed any videos from their platform into their own website. The best thing about that is that you are not using your own bandwidth to serve the videos meaning that the speed of your website will not be affected as well.

Popular cloud storing platforms like Amazon web services (AWS) permits all the users to upload videos and images to their platform for a small token and now connect to the stored resources using a single link or API access if you can program the connection yourself.

3. GZIPPING

Yes, Get it Zip (Gzip) is another option to consider when working on the speed of your website. This option makes it possible for web developers to compress large files into a gzip format which the website can load faster because it will be seen as a single zip and single page load will be needed.

Nearly all hosting platforms permit the use of gzip on their hosting plan but if you discover that your platform didn’t come with it, then try as much as possible to upgrade to the platform that permits it.

4. MINIFYING

I can still remember my first time of seeing a minified file (js) and I was like what is this. I was unable to make any sense of it not until I went to the popular search engine “Google” and searched for minified file and I was told the advantages of using minified files when building a web application. Minification of files means that the extra spaces in the files will be taken off and remaining just all the codes in the files.

Many popular frontend and backend frameworks like bootstrap and Laravel are using minified files for their js files so that the js files can be rendered faster for the speed of the website to load faster

5. BROWSER CACHING

This is another optimization method adapted by all open-source platforms and content management system where your visited web pages will be cached on the server and also on the users’ computer so that once they revisit the webpages again, it will just be loading from the cached pages making the website to load faster.

6. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

We have many content delivery networks online which enables us to store our website resources like CSS files, js files over to the CDN platforms and just be linking to them by a link given to us.

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