If you currently own a business website, you may have heard of a term called “web optimisation.” Most webmasters think that this term refers to optimising a site to rank better on search results. SEO is part of web optimisation. However, there are many benefits to optimising your business website beyond improving the page rank.
For starters, optimising a website can make bandwidth use more efficient, and thus save you a lot of money spent on web hosting services www.hostingaustralia.com.au and such. Also, an optimised website is more traffic friendly and easy to load and view for users. Therefore, your website development team should not focus solely on SEO. Here are some tactics that your site can adopt to make the best use of available bandwidth:
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Separate Components : If you have site components such as graphics or scripts that the web server you hire doesn’t need to process, then separate them. Doing so can decrease the demand on your bandwidth package during the times of the day when traffic spikes.
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Keep Redirects to a Minimum: The links you have on each webpage to redirect to other pages or third-party sites consume data. A redirect means one more HTTP request and more time consumed for RTT. Each redirect you have on a page slows down overall loading time. Therefore, keep these redirects to a minimum. Ideally, you should only redirect when these links are absolutely necessary, such as when a user lands on an expired page.
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Minimise DNS Lookup Time: DNS stands for Domain Name System. When a user clicks on a link, the DNS has to look up the IP address for that site. Only after this process completed the web browser can load a site. That buffering circle you sometimes see on your browser is the time it takes for the DNS to resolve an address. For some sites, the DNS lookup time can take as much as 120 milliseconds. For a potential customer used to quick web loading, this can feel like a long time. Therefore, you can improve site loading time by splitting web components over several different hostnames if needed.
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Compress JavaScript : Reduce the code load for your site by compressing multiple JavaScript into one line. You can do this as easily as changing URLs to move everything into a single file. You can use apps like Minify to automatically compress and combine script files in a matter of seconds.
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Compress Images: Graphics can take up a lot of space and consume a good amount of available bandwidth. Retail sites in particular can suffer because of the many product images. Therefore, you must compress these images to be more space efficient. Use the appropriate formats to save graphics in. For example, it’s better to use JPEG format for a photograph that goes online rather than PNG. Do not manually reduce the width and a scale of a large graphic for the web. It’s the number of pixels that matters, not the size.
The above tips may sound technical; however, they are very easy for even the beginner web designers to learn. They do not require hardcore coding skills to execute for your business website. Just as you try to make your workplace more efficient, you should make your website as bandwidth efficient as possible, too.
