The digital era makes all of your online assets very important, your website included. Your website is the pillar of your marketing strategy and customer/client experience. This is where they will come to look for information, fill out a form to contact you, subscribe to an email list, or purchase products and services directly from you.
Increasing website performance can help you improve the experience for your customers and even more. There are several ways to do it, though. Today, we will focus on common HTTP headers and how they can bring your website’s performance to the next level.
Why website experience matters
In many instances, your potential customers will first contact your brand through your official website. A website that has a long load time can frustrate your visitors and make them leave your site even before it loads completely. Fast loading speeds deliver exceptional experiences making your visitors want to stay and see what you have to offer.
But there is more to it. Website performance is also a search engine optimization factor. What does it mean? The faster your site loads, the higher it will rank in the search engine result pages. You will be able to generate more organic traffic, capture leads, and increase conversion rates.
Ways to improve the website experience
There are multiple ways to improve your website experience. Improving your page load speed is only one of them. You should always keep your eyes on the loading speed to ensure a lightning-fast website for both desktop and mobile visitors. The second thing that you should do is revisit your website navigation. For the most optimal experience, it has to be consistent, clear, and concise.
Furthermore, you should consider using white space in your website design and layout. Adding more white space can increase your visitors’ attention and communicate that your website is easy and ready to use. Finally, you can use high-quality images to appear more professional in the eyes of your visitors.
Using HTTP headers to improve site performance
If you want to improve the website experience by improving site performance, one of the best ways to do it is to use common HTTP headers. When your visitors communicate with your website, they exchange information. The more information they need to exchange before the page loads, the slower your website will load. Your goal is to keep this information to a minimum.
Since HTTP headers are part of this data transfer, reducing the size of your headers can help you improve site performance. Putting the right headers in the right place can help you boost your site performance in several ways:
- Speed up page load times overall;
- Prevent site slowing down or crashing under high traffic load;
- Increased speed thanks to cached elements;
- Reduce the data needed for the page to render;
- Keep the amount of data for loading from scratch to a minimum.
What are HTTP headers
It appears that common HTTP headers are quite powerful. But what is an HTTP header? HTTP header is a piece of code that plays a vital role during the website rendering phase. It is as important for browser requests as for server responses. As a website owner or moderator, you should know that you don’t have any control over the request headers your visitors use.
You can change the HTTP response headers, though. It leaves you with enough room to wiggle in and improve your site performance. The role of the response HTTP headers is to swap information with request headers in the most efficient way.
Best HTTP header types for this use
There are many HTTP header types out there, and you can easily get confused and not know which ones to use. The best common HTTP headers used for website performance include the following:
Caching headers
There is a way to store the constant parts of your website pages, such as scripts and certain page elements. Caching headers will help you improve your site’s performance through caching these static resources. When the same visitors come back to your site, they won’t need to load the same data over and over again.
Compression headers
The smaller the files are, the better as the server can exchange them faster with visitors’ browsers. You can choose from several content encoding (compression) methods, including Gzip, Brotli, and Zopfli. In either case, your website will load significantly faster.
Keep-Alive header
The Keep-Alive header will enable your site to maintain a single TCP connection. It can help speed up the retransmission of timed out and lost data. Although HTTP/2 users can reuse a single TCP connection for packet retransmission, you can still use this header to reduce delay times slightly. Navigate to this website to find out more about the most common HTTP headers for web scraping.
Conclusion
Website performance is the key factor in user experience. The easiest way to increase it is to use common HTTP headers. As you can see, there are several HTTP header types you can use to boost the site’s performance. We will leave it up to you to decide which one works best with your sit