It cannot be stressed enough that you should speed up your site. It can make or break you. The internet is all about speed.
We want things and we want them now. According to experts, it takes a user 4 seconds to leave a website for another because it did not load quickly. Imagine how much of an impact it can have on a website that does millions of dollars every day?
All businesses should pay special attention to the overall speed and performance of their website. A slow website will drive away potential customers faster than you can say:‘Oh my God!’
Luckily enough, there are cutting edge technologies that can significantly reduce the loading time of your website and make operations quick.
How to Speed Up Your Website: 4 Cutting-Edge Technologies
- HTTP/2
- SSL Certification
- Brotli
- CDN
1. HTTP/2
HTTP/2, which is an important protocol of World Wide Web, was released back in May 2015. What makes this technology important for website speed is something called multiplexing.
This ability is a major improvement in HTTP and is nothing less than a revolutionary design. It essentially helps with multiple requests during a single connection.
With this, previous techniques used by web designers are no longer effective. This includes Data URIs and Sprites. If you remember, HTTP/1 was not well equipped to handle multiple requests at the same time.
This was apparent when you loaded a large image in contrast with a group of smaller images. The former, despite being large, would take less time as compared with the second scenario. HTTP/2 has tackled this very problem.
Additionally, it also compresses the headers in effort to make the transfer easier. So before the data request is even considered, the compressed headers are pushed forward.
And the icing on the cake is that the latest version is binary instead of textual. As a result you can boost your website by 50%.
One thing to note here is that even though HTTP/2 does not require a security certificate, the browsers your website will appear on, generally do. So in order to jump to this new platform, you will need an SSL certificate first.
After that, implementing this new HTTP won’t be difficult and will possibly administer it on your own server. This means that whether you utilize it also depends on your hosting service.
2. SSL Certification
Secure socket layer or SSL is a certification that encrypts the connection between your server and your website. This certification is very easy to find, and you can implement it very quickly.
Let’s Encrypt provides a free SSL certificate and has been gaining popularity for its remarkable service. It gets rid of the need to manually obtain a certificate.
With this website, the whole process is automated and takes only a few minutes. It is achieved by a management system that resides on the server. You can find the steps to implementing this certification on their website. You can even find tutorials.
An SSL certification improves both security, and speed, while also benefiting the ranking of your website on search engines. Since 2014, SSL certification is considered as a ranking factor by Google.
3. Brotli
This is a compression algorithm created by Google back in 2015. In case you do not know, compression algorithms decrease the size of transport data.
Now, why is Brotli better than already existing compression solutions? According to Google, it can improve the compression by 26%. What does that mean in terms of data?
That means that you can save about 40% of traffic of HTML files and 25% for CSS and JavaScript. This is a huge improvement and can cut loading time significantly.
4. CDN
This is a network of servers spread across the globe. These servers have a copy of the website and basically its content i.e. images, videos, utilities, text documents etc.
So when a user accesses your website, they get data from the nearest servers within the network. This naturally improves the speed the user receives, as the data and the content load faster.
The other advantage of copying your website on several servers is that it becomes more reliable and rigorous.
Since it is residing on multiple servers, the traffic gets distributed, and you are spared any crashes due to heavy traffic. This technology can improve speed by up to 50%. This means that a website that takes 6 seconds to load can load in about 3 seconds.
If you really want to understand the effect of this, think of websites like Amazon.com or CNet.com. Using a CDN helps to retain users and can improve conversion rates too.
Conclusion
A slow website can be considered a dead website. Network speeds have improved all across the world, and users now find a slow loading process a buzzkill.
No business wants that, especially when their sales and revenues are riding on their website’s success. These four technologies have been created keeping in mind the speed and security needs of today’s web.
SSL certification is necessary for all kinds of websites. Without it, not only are you unsafe, but your website also ranks poorly on Google.
CDN is an amazing solution for content rich websites that need high speed. With this, they can reduce the loading time and tackle any crash issues.
Brotli is yet another way to reduce transfer time and improve speed. Upgrading to the latest available technology is the ultimate weapon to making your website the best of the best.
Now go and speed up your website using the advice from our article.
Saturday, September 2, 2023