Top 10 Ways to Make your Website Faster and Increase Website Conversion

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With faster access to Internet, users are flooding websites like never before.  There has been an increase in features of web 2.0 sites and rich media, and customers are demanding speedier page load times and better performance. Most websites, loose over 80 percent or more of their visitors within a few seconds upon landing on the site. They cannot find content, products, or services available on the website. This simply wastes all the hard work you did to get them there. Knowing a web site’s Conversion Rate is the most important e-metric to track. With new sites being launched everyday the struggle for existence increases. The key is to make your website faster and increase website conversion rate. Afterall its a matter of making the user’s life easy when visiting your site. After an extensive research we picked the top 10 ways to make your site faster and hike the conversion rate.

1. Work with web developer to better your website code

Coding is an art for any professional developer. They would try to keep the code as simple and elegant as possible. They need to make sure that the file sizes are small, reduce the redundant code, and reduce the number of calls to the server. Better coding will make your website nice and speedy.

2. Include any available caching mechanism

Some milliseconds of page load time is wasted whenever users access data from the database. In case, there are hundreds of processes each running some milliseconds, the entire time adds up to a bad customer experience. There are some content management systems that allow you to configure the caching - means server will only connect to the database once in an hour or once a day to get a new version of a particular page. In case you are using a WordPress then it not feasible for the CPU time. This problem can be easily fixed with a WP-cache Plugin.

3. Reduce the HTTP requests

Majority of end user time, nearly 80%, is spent in the front-end. The maximum time is consumed in downloading all the page components - images, stylesheets, scripts Flash etc. The number of HTTP requests can be minimized by reducing the number of page components that are required to be rendered. An effective way to reduce the number of page components is to design the page better. One of the most common techniques for reducing the number of HTTP requests, and still supporting rich page designs. Combined files the number of HTTP requests. It supports rich page design.

Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. Files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheet. Combining files is more challenging when scripts and stylesheet. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheets vary from page to page.

4. Load test the website

Test the limits of your website to ensure that it gets prompted to the first page of Digg and the content gets tweeted. Test the site to see where improvement is needed. Look for the loops that you can fix before Slashdot brings down the entire site. You can use free testing tools such as Load Impact or Gomez Instant Test Pro. The tools inform you how to optimize the performance of your site and adjust it accordingly.

5.Upgrade the website hosting

For all those economy hosting providers, who try to keep their costs down by cramming customers on one web server might suffer a slow down at times of high traffic. Such sites experience slow down when you neighbor experiences a Slashdot effect. Upgrade your site to a better  hosting provider or a dedicated server to reduce the chances of such slow down.

6. Flush the Buffer Early

After a request the backend server takes 200 to 500ms to stitch together the HTML page. During this time browser becomes ideal and waits for data to arrive. If your site’s build on PHP you can use the function flush(). It sends you a partially ready HTML response to the browser. The browser can start fetching components for backend with the rest of the HTML page. The benefits is to have busy backends or light frontends.

The best practice to flush after the HEAD as the HTML for the head is usually easier to produce. You can also  include any CSS and JavaScript files for the browser to start fetching in parallel while the backend continues processing. .

Here is an Example

… <!– css, js –>
</head>
<?php flush(); ?>
<body>
… <!– content –>

7. Reduce the Number of DOM Elements

The more complex page, the more bytes to download. This means slower DOM access in JavaScript. There may be a huge difference when you loop through 500 or 5000 DOM elements on the page and try to add an event handler. Greater number of DOM elements means, markup of the page without necessarily removing the content. You can use nested tables for layout purposes. If you are using more <div> to fix layout issues. Its better and more semantically correct way to do the markup.
The layouts are the YUI CSS utilities: grids.css that can help you with the overall layout.

To test the number of DOM elements, just type in Firebug’s console
document.getElementsByTagName(’*').length

Reconsider your markup, for instance use <div>s only when it makes sense semantically.

8. Eliminate  unnecessary cookies

To minimize users response time reduce the cookies size. Set the cookies at appropriate domain level, to ensure that other sub-domains are not affected

9. Avoid 404s

HTTP requests are most important and a  response (404 Not Found) is completely unexpected and useless for visitors.

In some sites 404s are helpful. Like you might get a prompt like this, Did you mean X? This is a sheer waste of server resources such as database. It is particularly worst when the link to an external JavaScript is wrong and the result shows 404 not found.

This download will not only block parallel downloads, but the browser may also try to parse the 404 response body considering it as a JavaScript code. Simply avoid

10 . Reduce Cookie Size

HTTP cookies are used for variety of reasons such authentication and personalization. Information about cookies are exchanged in the HTTP headers between web servers and browsers. It is important to keep the size of cookies as low as possible to optimize user’s response time.