In today's times, if you want a business to reach more people and grow, you need to have a platform that is fast and easily accessible for your customers. A slow and sluggish platform drives away the traffic and potential users of your website. A site speed is as crucial as other aspects of the website. That means a slow website means poor rankings, lower searches  and poor user experience as well. Optimising your website is essential for businesses in large cities like Birmingham to attract more users to their platform. So, in this blog, we will discuss some essential tips to help you in enhancing your site speed and how you can ensure a seamless experience for all your customers with the help of web design agency in Birmingham.

Tips to increase your site speed

Optimise Images

A website works slow and provides slow down loading times with the presence of larger images. Big files take time to load and often end up in showing the error, hence leading to less visitors or no users of your platform. So, you need to optimise images and reduce their sizes without compromising on its quality. You can use different tools and resources like JPEG promised and TinyPNG to make the sizes a bit smaller and in more appropriate image format. For photos use JPEG, for graphics with transparency use PNG and for logos, icons you can use SVG. To further improve load times on the mobile devices, you can use the HTML5  attribute so that only the correct size is implemented.

Enable Browser Caching

Second way is to enable your browser cache. Caching will help you store more used files and documents such as images, stylesheets and scripts on a visitor's device. This way, the image that is used will be taken from the visitors profile rather than your own folder which requires downloading. This way you can speed up your website load time. Browser caching can be done by implementing a maximum age to your http headers or adding an expiration date. These dates will indicate the amount of time a cached file needs to be stored, hence minimising server requests and improving the website speed.

Minimise HTTP Requests

Third method is to reduce the number of HTTP requests. To access any element on the webpage you need its address which has to be loaded. Whether it's an image, stylesheets or script. These requests can improve as well as downgrade the site's speed. So, make use of javascript and CSS to combine all the files into a single unit whenever possible. Along with that, you can also use CSS sprites to combine various images into one that can be displayed by using CSS background properties. Whenever you are designing a website page, you can also remove all the unnecessary elements that can decrease the HTTP requests and will help you improve the load times.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Next, the method is to make use of a content delivery network. A CDN is one network that has various servers distributed globally and also stores copies of your site's static files. Content delivery network delivers your copy of the content, whenever any visitors tries to access it. It takes the copy from the nearest place that can reduce the latency and load times. For people that are operating big businesses or a global brand can make use of these networks to improve speed for the local audience. Some of the most popular content delivery networks include Cloudflare, Akamai and Amazon CloudFront.

Leverage Asynchronous Loading for CSS and JavaScript

Lastly, you can utilise asynchronous loading for files with CSS and JavaScript. As these files can load one by one in the order they appear in the HTML document can lead to decrease in speed times. Synchronisation slows the content, especially with larger files in it. So, you must switch to asynchronous loading to allow many files to operate in one slot. The content renders more quickly thanks to this process. By adding the attribute to your script types, such as defer or async, you can add this kind of synchronisation. These tags will speed up the loading process and enable JavaScript to operate in tandem with other components.

Conclusion

In order to win the race amongst your competitors, you need to increase your speed and deliver content up to user satisfaction. Speed plays a major role in increasing website traffic and visibility. Use these pointers to improve the loading times of your website as it can also turn visitors into loyal customers. By hiring a web design agency in Birmingham, you can optimise your website and strengthen your reputation and competitiveness in the digital world.