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Website speed is a crucial part of website design that is oftensurprisingly neglected. According to,theedesign.comthe majority of usersexpect web pages to load in at least 2 seconds and web traffic will dropby around 40% if speeds are over 3 seconds. Don’t underestimate theimportance of speed to provide a better user experience, in turn drivingincreased engagement and higher conversion rates.
Minify
Minifying is a simple process that removes all the unneeded informationfrom code, such as line breaks, spaces, comments, etc. These charactersincrease file size unnecessarily, increasing website load time. Theonly downside is that it makes the code harder to read for developers. However, the solution is to unminify the code when developing and minifyagain when finished.
Example of unminified code:
Example of minified code:
Storing files locally
There are pros and cons to both CDN and storing files locally. If yourwebsite can’t access the CDN link, then it might not load correctly, butif you save files locally, they cannot be updated by the original owner,meaning redownloading any updates. Regarding speed, CDN is undoubtedlyfaster; this is because end users connect to the nearest CDN server,instead of waiting to receive their request directly from the source.
WebP
WebP is an image format that uses both lossy and lossless compression,with the ability to produce much smaller files than JPEG and PNG withlittle difference in image quality. According toGoogleGoogle WebP images are 26% smaller than PNGand 25-34% smaller than JPEG.
Increase your website speed significantly by using WebP over JPEG orPNG. However, at the moment the only major web browsers that supportWebP are Google Chrome and Opera. It is, therefore, best to implementfallbacks to these formats, if the user’s browser does not support WebP.
Data URI
Another optimisation tip is to use Data URIs. Usually, elements such asimages and style sheets make multiple hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP)requests. Data URIs, on the other hand, allows data to be includeddirectly within the web page, meaning they don’t need to make anadditional request to fetch the resource.
The fewer HTTP requests that you run, the faster the website will be since it doesn’t need to load asmany files. The size of Data URI strings do end up being larger thanaverage but will be quicker since you are only downloading one HTTPrequest as opposed to many. All major browsers support data URIs.
Example Data URI string:
<imgsrc=”data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAAFCAYAAACNbyblAAAAHElEQVQI12P4//8/w38GIAXDIBKE0DHxgljNBAAO9TXL0Y4OHwAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==” />
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