Make your website faster
There are many ways to improve user experience on a website. The real problem is that not all solutions can be applied to us. Most of them have a minimal impact if any.
The most common reason I have met is that most websites are built on platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. Therefore, there is a high probability those websites are using multipurpose themes. These themes are the result of very creative and hard work. However, the creators of those themes, in order to satisfy the most significant part of their customers, they include a lot of features —furthermore, unnecessary features which slow down the website eventually. Also, people often don’t understand how to get the most of those themes. So they install redundant plugins, extensions, and modules, that worsen the speed even more.
These are facts, and they are not an easy fix.
However, we can cheat our way out. They are some ways we can improve our website’s speed and user experience without knowing much about how our site works.
Use Web Caching
Web caching is a technique that stores copies of our website on a folder. And when a user asks for it, the webserver sends this copy instead of parsing the website’s code for each request. Web caching also keeps low your CPU consumption so that you may have a lower chance of your site getting crashed.
Choose a proper Web Hosting
If you are in a budget hosting solutions, you should know: Disk space isn’t the only feature you should consider. You should also ask about process power and RAM. These two are responsible for how much time it takes for the server to process your website’s code.
If you have your server (VPS or physical), make sure you allow enough memory and process power for your site. Also, you should consider increasing the threads your webserver is using to take advantage of modern browsers and HTTP2.
Use Prerender and Prefetch on the website’s header
Modern browsers allow the web page to preload the assets of another, just like a hidden tab on your browser. So when the user clicks on the link, the webpage loads instantly. That is a great way to improve UX without doing much.
If you can identify commonly used links on your site, you can add them like this on your website header.
<head>
<link rel="prerender" href="//example.com/next-page.html">
</head>We will talk more about prerender/prefetch in a later article.
