3 ways to make your website load 2 times faster

Everyone love a website that loads faster, not only human being but also spiders and crawlers like google bot and bing love a website that loads in few seconds. This factor can raise your ranking and hence drive more triffic to your website.

There are plent of tools that you can use to check if your website is slow or not like: Google page speed, Pingdom, Gmetrix...

Why you should enhance your website loading time?

Your website needs to be fast enough for your visitors. While that may not be the answer you’re looking for, it’s the one that your website visitors will appreciate. By monitoring your bounce rate (in Google Analytics or comparable metric trackers) and page load time (using the Chrome extension “Page Load Time” or more extensive trackers) you can continue to enhance your website and better serve your visitors.

You have to know that very fast websites can rank higher in search engines easly.

When a website is fast or slow than others?

This may seem ambigous for many people but it is easy to understand. If you have a website you should struggle to make it load faster than other websites in you competion in order to rank higher than them in search engines.

This means that there is no exact spead a website should have to rank higher. However it has to be faster enought than its competitors.

Here is what researches say:

. if your site loads in 5 seconds, it is faster than approximately 25% of the web

. if your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than approximately 50% of the web

. if your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than approximately 75% of the web

. if your site loads in 0.8 seconds, it is faster than approximately 94% of the web

It would be better if your website loads in 0.8 seconds but it is not a mandatory to rank higher in search engines.

What to do to make your website to load 2 times faster?

There are many different ways to enhance your web page speed but the first one to start with is to configure your hosting server to use static file caching and compression power that it has.

To achieve this you can do the following:

You can configure your server manual by changing the .htaccess file(Create one if it does not exists) located in the root folder of your website and adding the following lines:

#BROWSER CACHE

<IfModule mod_headers.c>

    <FilesMatch "\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|pdf|woff2|woff|ttf)$">

        Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"

    </FilesMatch>

</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_expires.c>

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresDefault "access plus 60 seconds"

ExpiresByType font/opentype "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType font/truetype "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType font/eot "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType font/woff "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType font/ttf "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType text/plain "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 5 months"

ExpiresByType application/xml "access plus 20 minutes"

</IfModule>

#END OF BROWSER CACHE

#COMPRESSION

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>

    # Old Browsers

    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

    BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

    <IfModule mod_headers.c>

      SetEnvIfNoCase ^(Accept-EncodXng|X-cept-Encoding|X{15}|~{15}|-{15})$ ^((gzip|deflate)\s*,?\s*)+|[X~-]{4,13}$ HAVE_Accept-Encoding

      RequestHeader append Accept-Encoding "gzip,deflate" env=HAVE_Accept-Encoding

    </IfModule>

</IfModule>

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/png

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/jpeg

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/gif

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/eot

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/woff

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/truetype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype

</IfModule>

#END OF COMPRESSION

Wordpress Tips:

If you are using wordpress you can go futher and install WP Super Cache plugin. This will generate html pages that will be server every time a use requests a page insted of generating it from the db. This wi enhance the time load of your website.

Last but not least:

You can also add a cdn to cache your static files on the servers that are close to users. So when a user requests a page, it will load faster because the files are stored closer to him/her. In addition, you main server will be hit by few requests hence the server load time will be reduced. This will allow it deliver pages quickly.