15 ways to reduce website size and speed up your site

A website is made of many parts: source code, database, text, images, video and other media. Each has a size measured in bytes. The total of these is the website size. Website size is always limited, and when the parts add up to nearly the limit, pages load slowly and the site runs poorly. That leads to a poor user experience, a high bounce rate and low conversion. So how do you fix it? This article on 15 ways to optimize website size MONA Media gives you a few useful tips.

Why optimize website size?

Most of us know that when a website is slow, we should reduce its size. But optimizing size does more than make the site faster. It brings other benefits too.

Helps your website run more smoothly

The total size of the website source code plays an important part in running the site over the long term. If total site size is low, moving the site to another server is easier, backup faster and smoother. If the site is much larger than it needs to be, those tasks become difficult.

In practice, many websites with little data still total tens of GB. The main cause is that the people running them webmaster do not regularly and properly optimize the size of the source code.

Lower your hosting costs

After a period of use, a website's available storage keeps shrinking. When a site runs out of space it has to buy more, which means paying extra to upgrade the plan.

Instead, first review the site and optimize its size as far as you can. Then, only if you need to, buy a higher plan.

Better user experience

A lightweight website runs fast, performs well and loads quickly. Visitors' actions on the site are processed quickly, which leaves customers more satisfied.

In practice, each visitor stays only a few seconds. If the page loads slowly and they can't get what they came for, they leave at once. That is a potential customer lost.

Improve conversion rate

A slow website means a worse experience, a weaker impression of the site and the brand, and less trust in the business. Do you think customers will trust and like you enough to buy from you or use your services?

Looking at the link between load time and conversion rate for one of its clients, Orange Valley reported that every extra 1 second of delay cuts conversion rate by more than 25%.

-> Read more: How to increase conversion rate for your website

15 ways to optimize website size

Optimizing image and video size is the most familiar way to optimize a website, but you can optimize many other parts as well. Here is a summary of ways to reduce website size that you can try.

Choose fast, good-quality hosting

Suppose you are preparing e-commerce web design, you will need to prepare the following:

• Source code (about 30MB)
• Posts (about 30KB in total)
• Illustrative images/videos on the website (about 50KB in total)
• Trang landing page introducing your products, services and store (about 5MB in total).

The estimated sizes may be higher depending on your needs. Add them up and you have the total website size you need. Combine that with your requirements for features, security and other perks, and you can find a hosting plan that suits your website.

To be sure you choose suitable hosting that stays stable over the long term, look to reputable hosting providers. You can refer to Fast, safe and secure web hosting for your website at MONA Media for more guidance.

SIGN UP rent web hosting at MONA today to get the best offer. We guarantee fast load times, high stability and strong security. You will no longer worry about long waits or unexpected interruptions. With MONA, your website keeps running smoothly and holds up in any situation.

Reduce HTTP requests

According to Yahoo!, 80% of a website's load time goes to loading elements such as images, files, Flash and stylesheets. Each HTTP request for these elements slows down how quickly the page displays.

The fastest way to optimize website speed is to simplify your web design by:

• Arranging page elements in order of priority
• Using CSS instead of images whenever possible.
• Combining several stylesheets into one.
• Reducing scripts, and ideally placing them at the bottom of the page.

Optimize website images

Images are estimated to make up more than 60% of total web size on average. So optimizing images contributes a great deal to reducing website size.

You can optimize web images in several ways, such as:

• Reduce image dimensions
• Use JPEG, PNG or GIF image formats (avoid BMPs and TIFFs).
• Use the SRC attribute for image code.

Enable Gzip

Pages with quality content are usually 100KB or more, which slows down page data loading.

One quick way to fix this is to compress that data. Gzip compression reduces page bandwidth and improves HTTP response time. Experts recommend it because 90% of internet traffic today goes through browsers that support Gzip, and the feature can cut page load time by more than 70%.

Enable browser caching

Pages you visit are stored automatically in the cache, or temporary memory, if it is turned on. Once a page has loaded and other elements are stored in the user's cache, you only need to download a few elements on later visits.

So on later visits, the browser loads faster without sending an HTTP request all the way to the server.

Reduce HTML, CSS and JavaScript

WYSIWYG editors make building a website easy and let you express everything you want with this set of resources. But they also leave messy code that slows page loading.

To avoid this, cut some unimportant resources without hesitation. Google also gives some suggestions when it sees a site in this state:

• Using PageSpeed Insights Use a Chrome extension to generate a more optimized HTML version.
• Use cssmin.js to reduce CSS.
• Use Closure Compiler and JSMin to optimize JavaScript.

Optimize server response time

Google recommends using a web application monitoring solution and checking for factors that can bottleneck page speed. Your server response time should be under 200ms for faster loading.

You can use YSlow or Google PageSpeed to evaluate page speed and get more suggestions for improving your website's performance.

Put content at the top of the page

When using external CSS, combine it with prioritizing above-the-fold content and try to remove JavaScript and CSS that block rendering on the first screen. Putting content first helps visitors reach their goal quickly, improving experience and conversion rate.

Clean up your WordPress installation

Remove theme files, plugins and hacks you won't use in future to save space. You can clean the database by deleting all spam comments, spam users, broken links, old drafts and post revisions in WordPress, which makes your website much lighter.

Reduce the number of plugins

Too many plugins slow a website down and cause hard-to-fix problems as well as security risks. Select carefully and deactivate plugins you do not need that may slow your site.

Reduce page redirects

Page redirects create HTTP requests and make pages load longer. Google recommends:

• Use redirects to send users to the mobile version instead of other intermediate redirects.
• Add the <link rel=”alternate” element on the desktop version so Googlebot can read the mobile version's URL.

Optimize the database

Database takes up disk space on the host. The bigger the database, the more storage it uses, and a backup is saved each time. This increases website size.

So make sure you remove junk data and useless content to shrink the size, making it easier for the hosting server to fetch requested content.

Use SSL

The HTTPs, data on the website is encrypted in both directions to and from the origin server. The protocol also keeps communication secure, so malicious parties cannot see what data is sent.

In addition, HTTPS allows faster connections than the old HTTP protocol. Using HTTPS also improves your website's SEO.

See also: Cheap SSL: register an SSL certificate for your website (DV SSL, OV SSL, EV SSL)

Remove Flash from the web

Flash is a tool that supports desktop browsers through an interactive layer between the two sides. Flash was widely used for benefits such as sharper text, playing music and watching video without complex software.

However, the drawback of this tool when used to build Google SEO services websites is that it handles visuals and effects but is weak in other features, is not SEO friendly and has security holes. Web developers today use CSS, PHP, HTML5 and more to overcome Flash's limits.

Other ways to reduce website size

Besides the approaches above, you can consider other ways to reduce web size, such as:

• Host all media with outside services such as YouTube, Photobucket, MediaFire and so on.
• Delete log files for safety and to free up hosting space.
• Disable user uploads to save disk space and bandwidth.
• Use cloud services for common scripts, and so on.

We hope this guide to 15 ways to optimize website size helps you speed up your website and improve the experience. If you need more support, contact the Mona Media support team via hotline 1900 636 648 for specific guidance.