Fast website

A fast website is becoming increasingly important. The longer a page takes to load, the greater the chance your visitor will leave. And did you know that fast websites also rank better in search engines?

Search engines like Google take your website’s speed into account in search results. db8 Website Support helps businesses make their websites lightning fast.

How to get a fast website?

Several factors influence the speed of your website:

Fast server

Opt for quality hosting and avoid budget options. Cheap hosting might seem appealing, but it often takes more time and effort to optimise your server. Moreover, you’re unlikely to achieve the speeds that a good hosting provider can deliver.

A good hosting provider offers:

optimised hosting
various server caching options
faster web servers (e.g. OpenLitespeed or Nginx instead of Apache) to get a fast website
Shell (SSH) access

Cache to speed up page loading

Fetching data from a database to display on a page takes time. By using cache, you store previously retrieved pages, allowing them to load faster. There are various types of cache, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

An optimised design template

Commercial templates

Commercial templates often look stunning and offer many options and effects. However, to make this possible, they frequently use dozens of JavaScripts, CSS files, fonts, and images. This makes them heavy, reducing your website’s speed. Fortunately, there's usually still plenty of room to optimise these templates.

Custom templates

A custom-made template is lightweight, uses only one JavaScript and one CSS file, and contains only what's truly necessary. This immediately improves performance compared to commercial templates.

A fast website uses few extensions

The more modules and plugins you have on a page, the slower it becomes. By carefully analysing which extensions you really need, you can significantly speed up your website.

Images

Make sure your images are saved in the correct format and file type, and use lossless compression to optimise them further. This way, you only send what’s truly necessary to your visitors.

Do you need help making your Joomla website lightning fast? Contact db8!

Why is a fast website important?

Good user experience

Fast Load Times: Users expect a website to load within seconds. Slow websites can lead to frustration and a negative user experience.
Bounce Rate: A slow website can cause visitors to leave the site quickly (high bounce rate), often within seconds if the page does not load fast enough.
Usability: Fast websites are generally more user-friendly, leading to higher satisfaction and a higher likelihood of visitors staying longer and viewing more pages.

SEO (Search engine optimisation))

Higher in search results: Search engines like Google prefer faster websites and reward them with higher positions in search results. This means more visibility and organic traffic.
Mobile Optimisation: Especially on mobile devices, speed is essential. Google uses the loading speed of the mobile version of a site as an important factor for its position in search results.

Higher conversion

Higher conversion: Fast websites tend to have higher conversion rates. Users are more likely to make purchases or fill in contact forms on a website that is fast and responsive.
Trust and reliability: A fast website exudes professionalism and reliability. This is beneficial for user confidence and can encourage them to take action.

Better competitive advantage

Faster than the competition: In competitive markets where several companies compete for the same customers, a fast website can offer a significant competitive advantage.
Customer satisfaction: Satisfied customers are more likely to return and recommend your website to others, which can lead to greater customer loyalty and word-of-mouth.

Cost reduction

Less server load: Fast websites put less load on the server. This can lead to lower hosting costs and more efficient use of resources.
Maintenance and management: Well-optimised websites are easier to maintain and therefore more cost-efficient.

Accessibility

Mobile visitors: users with slower internet connections and mobile visitors with limited data bundles can visit fast websites better, improving accessibility.

How can you increase the speed of your website?

Analyse your website

Use different tools to analyse the speed of your website:

Chrome DevTools: Through ‘Inspect’, the Google Chrome browser offers a range of tools for developers to analyse and improve a website's performance.
Lighthouse: This is an open-source tool that lets you perform performance audits, accessibility checks and more. You can access Lighthouse is available through Chrome DevTools.
Google PageSpeed Insights: This tool from Google analyses a web page's content and provides suggestions on how to make it faster. It also provides a score for both mobile and desktop versions of the site.
GTmetrix: GTmetrix offers a comprehensive analysis of a website's performance and provides detailed reports and recommendations for optimisation.
Pingdom Website Speed Test: This tool lets you test your website's load time from different locations worldwide. It also provides detailed performance reports.
WebPageTest: A comprehensive tool that can run multiple tests on different browsers and locations. It offers detailed reports, including waterfall graphs and recommendations.
YSlow: A tool developed by Yahoo that helps you analyse and improve the performance of your website based on predefined rules.
Screaming Frog: Commercial software to improve your website's SEO, and which also allows you to detect the slow pages in your website.

Optimise images

Pixel size: Adjust the pixel size of photos to the size at which they will be displayed on the website. A 6000px by 4000px image will soon be 3MB in size and therefore not suitable for a website.
Compression: Use image compression to reduce the file size of images without noticeable loss of quality. You can use tools such as TinyPNG and JPEG optimisers for this purpose.
Formats: Make sure images are saved in the right formats. For photos, use JPG, for graphics with transparency or text PNG.
Modern file formats: Photos in modern file formats like WebP and AVIF are even better optimised for websites and make the website faster.

Use cache

Browser caching: Set caching rules so browsers can save and reuse static files such as images, CSS and JavaScript without downloading them again.
Server caching: Retrieving files is faster than retrieving data from a database via queries. Therefore, use server-side caching to cache dynamic content from the database and reduce server load.

Optimise file loading

Merge files: Combine CSS and JavaScript files to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
Minimise external files: Remove unnecessary spaces, comments and empty lines in CSS, JavaScript and HTML files.
Use HTTP/2: Use HTTP/2 to load multiple files simultaneously and improve the load times of CSS and JavaScript files. It also compresses HTTP headers and allows you to prioritise certain CSS or JavaScript files.
Lazy Loading: Using ‘lazy loading’, images and other media are not loaded until they come into view. This reduces the initial loading time of the page.
JavaScript asynchronous Loading: Load JavaScript files asynchronously to prevent them from blocking page rendering.
JavaScript deferred Loading: Use the ‘defer’ attribute to load scripts only after the HTML is fully loaded.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

File distribution: With a CDN, your website distributes files (such as CSS and JavaScript files, images, movies and documents) across multiple geographically distributed servers, improving load times for users worldwide.

Optimise server speed

Fast Web Hosting: Choose a reliable web hosting company with fast servers. Consider switching to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a dedicated server as shared hosting is often slower.
Server configuration: Optimise server settings and use faster web server software such as Nginx or LiteSpeed instead of Apache.

Monitor and analyse continuously

Performance tools: Use online tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom to measure your website's performance and identify areas for improvement.
Regular updates: Keep your CMS, and extensions up-to-date to benefit from performance improvements and security updates.

How we can make your website faster!

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