How I reduced clients website loading speed from 10 to 2 sec? Time: 2 hours, Charged: $500

Few days back...

I optimized a client's website loading speed from 10 sec to < 2 sec

Time spent: 2 hours
Charged client: $500

Here are 8 steps I did which You can follow them to optimize website made with any CMS or technologies:

First, why should you make any website faster?

• ✔️ Decrease bounce rate by 57% (as per study)
• ✔️ Increases google ranking
• ✔️ Happy Visitors/Customers

let's check the steps 👇

1/ Analysing website:

➡ Go to http://gtmetrix.com

➡ Enter the URL and hit "Test your site"

➡ In few secs you'll see complete report containing GTmetrix Grade, Performance & structure.

(GT metric report)

➡ In GT metric report scroll down to "Top Issues"

➡ Which will show issues related to JS, CSS, Images, too many requests, page size & more

👉 GTmetrix will show most of the improvements, BUT NOT ALL

➡ Let's resolve issues pointed by GT metric

2/ Image size optimization:

➡ Reduce all image sizes from MB to KB

➡ Go to http://squoosh.app
➡ Upload original images
➡ Download compressed images
➡ Replace in your website

3/ Lazy load images:

➡ Lazy loads defer loading of images until user scrolls near them

➡ Do only if there are lot of images

➡ Just add loading="lazy" in img tags

(check screenshot)

4/ Caching js & css

➡ Caching assets loads them once & stores them in browser cache

➡ This reduces loading time of subsequent pages

➡ Cache them by adding an asset version

(check screenshot)

5/ Minify JS & CSS:

➡ Minifying JS & CSS will reduce their size by almost 70%

➡ Go to http://smalldev.tools, search js/css minifier

➡ Minify all js & CSS

PS: keep a backup of non-minified files in case it may be required later

6/ Move JS to end of document:

➡ JS blocks all other resources
➡ This increases "First Contentful Paint" time
➡ Move them to end of HTML document

7/ Brotli compression:

➡ It reduces HTML size by almost 80%

➡ Go to http://giftofspeed.com/gzip-test/ & check if enabled or not

➡ If not, contact hosting to enable it

➡ Or use cloudflare to use this for free

Now we're done with optimization suggested by GTmetrix

➡ Re-test your website & you'll see a good improvement 🤩

➡ but not yet 100% optimized

Let's optimize more...

8/ Database optimization:

Unoptimized DB can reduce speed by a lot

DB optimization can be a big topic, but doing this basic will help

➡ Add indexing to fields used for searching, sorting & table joins (basic)

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This is my first post. Hope this post helps!

Comment below for an questions you have.

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Comments

[Medea]

This is really helpful! Thanks!

[Nikhil Agrawal]

Thanks Medea!