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March 12, 2025

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Many people know that improving the website loading speed by 0.5 sec is invisible to the users. But it’s still one of the essential search engine factors they use in their ranking algorithms. Also, many web users may use a slow Internet connection, even in the USA and Europe. That is why improving website loading speed is a high-priority task for web development teams. How to improve the website speed?

What is website speed?

Technically the term website loading speed is incorrect because it is about page loading speed. 

In short, website loading speed refers to how quickly the content and UI elements of the specific page load when a user visits it. 

Several factors can influence specific page speed: 

  • The amount and size of the images and videos are contained on the page
  • UI animations
  • Themes and plugins are installed on the site
  • Front-end and server-side technologies are used
  • The code quality
  • Hosting or server

But you must know that the user’s Internet connection also affects the web page speed.

Start with website speed testing

You may start the website speed test with your smartphone and mobile Internet connection. Does your site load quickly enough? Does your site look mobile-friendly? This test helps you to identify critical speed issues and how responsive the design of your website is.

But using a smartphone test can’t tell about a website’s score in terms of the website loading speed. Also, it can’t help to identify the causes of slow website loading. That is why you should use tools to test and measure your website’s loading speed.

The most used tool is Google Pagespeed Insights. It is easy to use and provides you with the most critical information. Look at the snapshot for our website.

AHN’s team developed this site. You can see good scores and no critical issues that could affect the website loading speed.

If Google Pagespeed Insights identifies issues, it will provide recommendations for increasing the website’s performance.

This free tool allows testing the site’s mobile and desktop versions. You can use the Lighthouse tool that is built-in Chrome browser—Press F12 to run web developer tools and choose the Lighthouse tool to test the page.

Also, web developers may use other tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom, or Performance Budget Calculator. 

Some tools are free, but other tools can be payable. Many web professionals use Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals reports because it is usually enough.

Guidelines to improve the website loading speed

The Lighthouse tool (Google Pagespeed Insights) assessed your site as poor (score is less than 50) or as a website that needs improvements (score from 50 to 89). A web developer must look at the tool’s recommendations and fix issues. 

This guide will help you to understand which factors influence website speed and how to increase it.

Optimize the images

Surprisingly, images are one of the most common issues affecting website loading speed. The main reason is that content managers do not pay attention to the size and format of the images when uploading them to the website.

There is a typical image optimization process.

Reduce the image size.

Photos, images, or graphics on the web pages improve engagement. But if you use large files, the images slow down a website.

Compressing images using tools is one way to reduce image size without affecting quality. Another way to reduce the image size is to adjust the image size based on user display properties.

Choose the right image format.

Look at this image. It shows the difference between a zoomed-in vector image L and a raster image R.

As you can see, vector images are preferable options as they are resolution-independent and always deliver excellent results.

If you use raster images, a web developer should serve different image sizes to other devices. But bear in mind that serving desktop-sized images to mobile phones can use 2–4x more data than needed.

Use WebP images

When Facebook switched to WebP, they noticed a 25-35% filesize savings for JPEGs and an 80% for PNGs.

How to convert images to WebP? Usually, web developers use the cwebp command-line tool (for simple projects) or the Imagemin WebP plugin(for complex projects).

Replace animated GIFs with video.

GIFs aren’t a good choice when you need a fast website because their size can be 10-15 MB.

It takes a lot of time to upload a GIF file. That is why web professionals convert GIFs into video files (MPEG or WebM).

Use image CDNs to optimize images.

Image content delivery networks (CDNs) specialize in transforming, optimizing, and delivering images. They are excellent at optimizing images and can yield a 40–80% savings in image file size. Image CDNs work like API, making it easy to create variations of an image for different use cases by indicating parameters like size, format, and quality.

Use lazy loading

Lazy loading is a technique that defers the loading of non-critical resources while the web page loads. In practice, the image lazy loading loads lightweight placeholder images at page load and replaces them with lazily-loaded images when they’re scrolled into the viewport.

Using lazy loading makes sense if you use many media files on your site.
Web developers can use a variety of ways to implement lazy loadings, such as browser-level lazy loading, Intersection Observer (JavaScript), or CSS. If your website is built on WordPress, you can use plugins.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content delivery networks (CDNs) improve site performance using web servers distributed across various locations. These servers retrieve content from the website server and provide website content to users with regard to their location. CDNs reduce server load and handle traffic spikes. 

Also, CDNs allow caching resources on their servers. As a result, the resources are delivered more quickly. Cashing also reduces the load on the website server.

To choose a good CDN, you should focus on its performance, security, analytics features, support, and pricing. 

You need to know that CDN performance can vary significantly depending on geography, time of day, and different events. That is why predicting the exact performance you’ll get from a CDN is difficult.

Choosing a good CDN depends on the type of your site (e-commerce, corporate website, blog), user locations, and your budget.

Prioritize loading resources

Not every website resource has the same degree of importance, which is why browsers attempt to make a guess at the most important resources to load first. The problem is browsers could use the wrong priority for website resources. For example, loading scripts before CSS.

Web developers can use different ways to influence browsers’ priority-making process.

If a web developer adds the <script> tag in the page’s <head>, Chrome will load at a high priority. But using the async attribute changes it to low priority.

Also, a web developer can use <link rel=”preload”> (informs the browser that a resource should start getting fetched as soon as possible), <link rel=”preconnect”> (informs the browser that you’d like the process to start as soon as possible), and <link rel=”prefetch”> (it tries to make something non-critical happen earlier if there’s a chance) for other resources.

To make everything right, a web developer should know the browser’s priority for each resource. For example, to know Chrome’s priority, you need to press F12 to run DevTools and find the Network panel.

These priorities help to understand how much relative importance the browser attributes to resources. A web developer can influence the browser to assign a different priority. For example, if an image is a part of the initial render, a web developer prioritizes it higher than an image that starts offscreen.

Optimize CSS code

CSS code must be loaded before the browser renders the website page because it is a render-blocking resource. If these web pages contain unnecessarily large CSS code, it takes longer to render them.

There are two main techniques that web developers use.

The first is deferring non-critical CSS. Many non-critical styles apply to content that’s not immediately visible, for example, paragraphs inside the accordions. A web developer can defer this non-critical code.

The second is minifying CSS. Minification CSS files is a technique that reduces unnecessary code, comments, whitespaces, and indentation in CSS files. A professional web developer can safely remove unnecessary characters and reduce CSS file size without affecting website rendering. 

If web developers minify CSS files, you will see that recommendation “Minify CSS” moved to the “Passed Audits” section of the Lighthouse report.

Optimize JavaScript code

JavaScript code is a critical part of modern website design. On the other hand, using JavaScript code may slow down a website’s loading speed.

A web developer should analyze the Lighthouse report to fix JavaScript issues and speed up a website. There are most common issues and solutions.

First, the JavaScript code used on the website is a significant source of tasks. What is a task? A task is any discrete piece of work that the browser does and impacts the website’s performance. It can be rendering, parsing HTML and CSS, and running JavaScript code.

Some tasks can be too long (that take more than 50 milliseconds), and a web developer should break up such tasks. In other words, a web developer needs to divide a long task into smaller tasks that take less time using one of the task management strategies like the async attribute, manually defer code execution, yield only when necessary, and others. Choosing a strategy depends on the main website features you’d want to consider when managing tasks because it is about usability and how users interact with a website.

Minification JS code is another way to improve a website’s speed. To minify JS code a web developer should remove whitespace and any code that is not necessary to create a perfectly valid code file.

JS code compression is the process of modifying data using a specific algorithm. Most web developers use Gzip for server and client interactions, but Brotli is a newer compression algorithm that helps to achieve even better compression results than Gzip.

Also, we recommend using modern JavaScript to avoid reducing the website’s loading speed.

Modern JavaScript means syntax supported by all modern browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. But using modern Java Script requires high-skilled web developers who have experience in advanced front-end and web app technologies.

Move a website to better hosting.

In some cases, the leading cause of slow website speed is hosting. A website owner must choose fast hosting to optimize the website’s performance.

Several solutions can be used to host a website.

Shared hosting is the most popular solution because it is cheap. But shared hosting means that you share the server’s CPU and RAM with many other sites that are also hosted on this server. If you need more RAM and CPU because your site attracts many visitors or use one of the modern frameworks, you need Virtual Private Servers (VPS) hosting or a dedicated server.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and dedicated servers are faster than shared hosting. VPS  is fit needs of many business and e-commerce sites because it uses multiple servers for content distribution and provides your own part of the virtual server.

Using a dedicated server is the most expensive solution because you need to rent or buy a server and pay for the system administrator’s services.

Now alternative solutions are also available for website owners. You can use cloud solutions like Microsoft Azure, Google, or AWS. Cloud providers provide quality services that can scale on demand for your needs.

Another alternative option is the serverless approach.

Choosing a hosting provider is not easy but worth the effort.

Conclusions

Currently, a website’s loading speed is a vital factor that search engines assess, affecting website traffic and, as a result, business revenue.

You can test your website speed using one of the tools to know if improvements are needed. 89 score and below means your site’s performance needs to be improved. Image optimization and minification of CSS and JS can speed up a website. But as you can see, it is not an easy task. 

Also, hiring skilled web developers who can write quality, optimized code is important. Because it is an almost impossible job to optimize a website that was created by low-skilled web specialists. Re-developing the website from scratch becomes easier, faster, and cheaper in this case.

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Community engagement coordinator Won Joon Lee tells Block Club Chicago that the group teaches Pungmul, a Korean folk tradition with deep historical roots. It originated in Korea’s pre-industrial farming culture and used the hourglass-shaped janggu (a double-sided drum) to protest immigration and racism. 

Lee explained that during the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, public gatherings were prohibited except for musical performances, making Pungmul a form of resistance. 

In 2017, two long-standing organizations,  the Korean American Community Services, and the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center were combined to become Hana Center, named from the Korean word for “one.”

The organization has a long history of youth Pungmul programming, but this summer marked the first time the non-profit offered classes for adults interested in advocacy work. 

The first-ever class will proceed after the initial session of eight weeks has passed. As the new program expands, the instructors intend to continue enrolling new students in it on an ongoing basis.

Hana Drum School instructor Inah Jeong said Pungmul drumming is loud as planned, and they are culturally and politically distinct. Korean immigrants may connect with Chicago immigrants and join the immigrant rights and citizenship march, she tells Block Club Chicago.

The ensemble delivered its first drumming class this summer, but new students are always welcome to join in. Residents and community organizations can benefit from such events, according to the center’s administrators.

Choi tells Block Club Chicago that the current situation is both exhausting and frightening, but she believes the strong and loving communities they form may provide joy even in difficult times.

Their communities enable them to change the world now and in the future. The goal according to Choi is to turn community building into advocacy that targets racial, gender, and economic concerns along with immigrant rights.

Hana Center is located at 4300 North California Avenue in Irving Park. It also offers services to address needs related to citizenship and immigration, housing, and other areas.

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TomoCredit Raised Its Value To $222M To Help Gen-Z Build Credit Fast

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It has also secured $100 million in debt financing and has raised $39 million in equity since its launch.

The newly acquired funds will be put to use by the corporation in the form of product line expansion, which may include the provision of mortgages and automobile loans. 

Kristy Kim founded TomoCredit in 2019 to help international students get credit. Three and a half years later, the fintech no longer focuses just on immigrants but is now also eyeing domestic students and SMBs that want to “build credit fast”. They received 2.5 million applications over time.

TomoCredit provides users credit limits of up to $30,000. It earns revenue from merchant interchange fees, not consumers. It doesn’t require a credit check, a deposit, or an APR.

According to TechCrunch, the firm doesn’t use FICO scores to underwrite, unlike many other credit offerings. Tomo Score, a “proprietary” underwriting algorithm, identifies “high potential borrowers” without credit scores. 

“Our customers are not in financial trouble…Once you identify them and give them a card, they spend a lot and don’t default. Our performance has been great and that gave us and our investors the confidence to scale.” Kim told TechCrunch.

Morgan Stanley’s Next Level Fund and Mastercard participated in the equity portion of the deal including GoldHouse, Asian Hustle Network, and Hyphen Capital, while Silicon Valley Bank provided the debt.

Alice Vilma co-manages Morgan Stanley’s Next Level Fund, which invests in early-stage innovation and tech-enabled enterprises with women or diverse founding teams, said that she was amazed by Kim’s ability to recognize a need as a young female immigrant and create a financial product.

“As a first-generation South Korean immigrant, I wanted to help immigrant communities to reach their American Dream faster with TomoCredit,” Kim told TechCrunch. “It has been wonderful to partner with minority-focused funds who truly understand Tomo’s mission.”

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“My dad left our family for another woman when I was around 6 years old”

You might have heard a tale similar to this one here and there, but for every family who is now going through this — it feels like the beginning of the end. 

What more if your father left your family when you were young and just beginning a new life in a foreign place?

Nevertheless, it is utterly devastating that some even end up questioning themselves, “what have I done wrong or what should I have done right?” But eventually, you’ll come to the conclusion that you should just accept it, keep a positive attitude and figure out how to go on living your life without a father figure.

But what if one day your father knocks on your door and asks if he could come back to your family’s life?

Here’s Ai Nguyen, A Life and Business Breakthrough Coach, who shares a powerful story through her voice and experience of her 80-year-old dad.

The Crucial Memory

Last week, I celebrated my dad’s 80th birthday.  It was a deeply healing experience for me. Many of you don’t know this, but my dad left our family for another woman when I was around 6 years old, about a year after we had immigrated from Vietnam over to America. Here we are in a strange new country, and then he left us.

One of the last memories I had at that time was that he took me to the bus stop in the morning for school and told me that he was leaving the family and wasn’t coming back. That was it. I came home from school and he was gone.

For decades, I had blocked out this CRUCIAL memory of the bus stop day. It was brought out again during a healing hypnosis session I had last year. While growing up, he would come and visit our family from Guam every few years to attend any huge celebrations such as family weddings. 

Here we are in a strange new country, and then he left us.

-Ai nguyen

The Comeback

But then, about 18 years ago, he asked us if he could come back because he was struggling with his business. He was basically going to be homeless if we didn’t take him in.

This was such a stressful time in my life because we had to learn to build a life without him fully being there and then we had to also learn to accept him as he came back. Long story short, when he came back, even though he stayed, he had lost his power in the family.

We weren’t interested in what he had to say. I wasn’t interested in his opinions. Because, honestly, he lost our respect when he left the family. So, we had never celebrated his birthday.   

My dad had to learn how to make peace with himself. He practiced Buddhism, spirituality, and yoga to calm his internal state.

Long story short, when he came back, even though he stayed, he had lost his power in the family.

-Ai nguyen

The Celebration of Birthday and Healing

Fast forward to last week, his birthday party, my husband Dave and I flew back to St. Louis, Missouri to celebrate this with my family. My dad has been asking the family for the past year to do a party for him. He had an inkling that he would die soon and it was important for him to experience this. And so we made tons of food and brought the whole family together.

And there was a moment where I caught him feeling super happy, in front of the colorful walls, getting photos taken by me. Like a child’s smile when they are being acknowledged and celebrated. I caught it in the moment and in the photos.  

Ai’s father all smiles for his 80th birthday

And all of a sudden..

A deep level of compassion and forgiveness fell into my body.

(As I am writing this, I am CRYING. Nose dripping, wiping my shirt all over my face type of crying)

I suddenly realized that this man is 80 years old. And now he’s finally being celebrated. My heart felt the pain of living in a body for 80 years and not experiencing the greatest, most loving moments in life.  

I felt compassion for the pain of him having to forgive himself for his mistakes. I felt compassion for him, probably realizing he could have done more in his lifetime, but he didn’t get to do so. I felt compassion for him for having to release guilt, shame, and resentment over the years. Because death is near, and he simply wants to be acknowledged.

At that moment, I saw the inner child in him; the child who just wants more praise, love, and attention on this special day. And I wish if I had been quicker in my realization, that I had taken more pictures, to make him laugh, and make it even more of a special day for him. 

(A moment of regret showed up for me)

I suddenly realized that this man is 80 years old. And now he’s finally being celebrated. My heart felt the pain of living in a body for 80 years and not experiencing the greatest, most loving moments in life.  

-ai nguyen

This was the level of compassion that I had prayed for, and I wasn’t ready to fully receive it for many years until I participated in this birthday party.

I got balloons with his favorite celebration colors: red and gold. (Coincidentally, his outfit matched my balloon colors).  Intuitively, I knew what he wanted. If my sister had not asked me to be in charge of the balloons and decorations at the last minute, I would have missed out on seeing the joy and happiness in my dad.  

It was as though SPIRIT planned all of this to happen FOR ME.

I share this story with you because I want you to know that we all have the opportunity to experience forgiveness and healing. Be present, be open, and compassionate and spirit will give you powerful insights. Life flies by fast. Always celebrate yourself. Find gratitude and greatness in your reality and everything will shift for you!

Lastly, you have the power to turn your pain into your purpose.

Ai Nguyen

Your Life and Business Breakthrough Coach

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The company’s founder William Lim said that her wife was from a fishing family and his enthusiasm for fishing sparked his successful business – but his entrepreneurial journey wasn’t easy.

Be a risk-taker

He advised taking calculated risks and anticipating outcomes. “When we came up with advertisements, in three to six months, our sales started to improve slowly. You need to spend to build your brand name so people will have confidence in your product,” he told Esquire.

Good Brand Communication

By learning how to communicate effectively to store owners and consumers about your brand, you will be able to differentiate it from its competitors. “Because nobody knew our brand, supermarket owners did not want to accept our products to be on their shelves,” he told Esquire Magazine, he had to personally visit the stores to convince them for a chance to sell their product. 

Adapt to the times

Simply abandoning ineffective old methods, and always taking opportunities to improve.

Remain focused on your vision

Never forget what the goal was when starting and always remember what the company stands for. He added that when it comes to making decisions about the company, these guiding principles will serve as the primary motivation and compass. “If you keep changing your focus, you have less time to succeed. You have to put your heart and mind to your vision and never give up, no matter the odds,” he tells Philstar.

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