How to speed up your website

How fast is your website?

The time it takes for your website to load may put off visitors from even stepping foot onto your website.

No matter how pretty or well designed your website is, how it is developed and what hosting provider you use may be all your website needs to increase traffic.

To find out what is slowing down your website click either of these links for a free speed test on Google or pingdom. Both provide an in depth look into your websites processes.

Google provides documentation to help optimise your website although the information provided isn’t always clear or easy to understand.
Get in touch with me if you want me to look into what can be done to improve your websites speed.

Easy improvements to increase website speed include

Optimising images for the web.

Large images increase the load time. Images can be optimised without loosing quality by saving for web on Photoshop or running images through a minifying tool like ‘JPEG mini’ and ‘TinyPNG’. WordPress has a variety of plugins like ‘WP Smush’ and ‘EWWW Image Optimizer’ that can bulk optimise your images within your website.

Enable browser caching.

Browser cashing allows your website files to be temporarily saved within users computers. This decreases the number of server requests as key files like the images, CSS (Styles) & JavaScript (Whiz Bang Effects) have already been stored. WordPress has many cache plugins. My preferred WordPress cashing plugin is ‘W3 Total Cache’.

Minify Files.

Files like the CSS, HTML & JavaScript can all be minified cutting out spaces and comments to reduce the file size.

It helps if the files have been coded correctly. Messy and unnecessary code can be cut out to reduce the size and let the web browsers read them easier.

Put JavaScript in the footer.

JavaScript files are normally large and slow down the load time on the website. When placed in the footer the JavaScript files get loaded last allowing users to access the visible content while the ‘Whiz Bang Effects’ get loaded in.

Get a faster server.

I use one.com or Heart Internet for my hosting provider, they are both relatively fast & good value. For larger more intensively used websites I would recommend a website with a content delivery network (CDN) to speed up file downloads or a faster website host like WPEngine or Amazon AWS.

If you need any help on improving your website speed feel free to get in touch and we can take a look into what I can do to help you.