5 Ways to Boost Front End Performance

There are tons of websites on the internet and new ones will keep emerging. Building a professional website is now a basic requirement for businesses, or else, such brands will be left behind. As a matter of fact, only the sites that are able to load quickly tend to survive the tough competition and stand out. Some of the issues affecting websites that are not well optimized include slow load time and inability to be mobile responsive. They will also find it difficult to support cross browser compatibility.

Apart from improving page load speed, front end optimization plays a huge role in the overall performance of websites. This is crucial for SEO which helps to drive traffic to your site. Adopting the following best practices will ensure that customers visit your site often. In fact, they are bound to spend more time on the most important pages.

1. Enable Pre-fetching

This is an effective way to improve the browsing experience of online visitors. The basic types of prefetching include prerendering, link prefetching and DNS prefetching. It involves fetching the images, URL, JavaScript and CSS of each link before they are even needed. The good thing is that prefetching can be enabled without any hassles.

2. Minification

Without mincing words, notes and indentations are very useful when writing the source code in an editor. They increase the readability of the code and ensure that it remains neat. Their disadvantage is that they can increase the byte size of the entire document. Minification comes in handy for removing the extra bytes in your HTML, CSS and JS files. There are various tools on the internet to achieve this goal. It should be noted that minification rarely interferes with the overall performance of files.

3. Optimize Images

An image file often contains additional information such as location and date which drastically increases its megabytes. It is obvious that high definition images adversely affect the rendering process of websites. The best thing is to utilize a powerful optimization tool for deleting the irrelevant image data. When selecting tools, opt for the ones with lossy compression settings that helps to retain image quality.

4. Compress Files

A great number of site owners are always eager to discover better ways to manage content and different files. Gzip is widely used for compressing files, especially the ones that can’t be uploaded directly to a content delivery network. Another viable tool is Brotli which is relatively new, but gradually gaining popularity.

5. Reduce HTTP Requests

External HTTP requests is one of the main factors that slow down websites. In view of this, endeavor to take an objective look at your webpage frequently. As you check your site, remove unnecessary features like extra CSS or unnecessary plug-ins, JavaScript code and images. Using a reliable content delivery network also goes a long way in optimizing HTTP requests.

Achieving your Website Development goals for this year starts with handling front end optimization the proper way. Even though it may take some time to get results, the approach comes with lots of benefits for your site.