15 Ways to Speed Up your Website

It is imperative to start a well defined frame work on increasing the speed of our blog. Audience or visitors are time conscious on the net because, they seems to have lots of things to do almost at the same time.

Connecting with friends and family across so many social networking sites, researching and educating themselves on products or services they need or would eventually engage in, couple with the limited time they allotted to surf the internet.

Then, the competitive environment with millions of site offering the same solution that are presented to customers through numerous search engine channels. All these among other factors would make them abandon a site that takes long to load.

To really catch their attention whenever they visit is to optimize our site to promptly respond to clicks as they navigate through pages.

Apart from this, implementing page load best practices would reduce bandwidth consumption and save the server from unnecessary burden.

How can we really achieve this?

1. Use the best image format. The best image type that consume less space volume are JPEG, PNG and GIF images. Ensure images are converted to either of these formats before uploading to site.

2. Host images on another server. It is a wise decision to host images on flickr or amazon S3 accounts.

3. Re-size images. Use Photoshop or other image re-sizer software to minimize the size of image before upload. Don’t re-size after uploading.

4. Add slash at the end of URL e.g www.frandimore.com/home/

5. Use height tag and width tag to define the specific space occupied by images or tables e.g < img id =”watch” height= “250” width=”250″ src=”http://www.frandimore.com/watch.png” alt=”watchimage” />

6. Don’t embed CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) on each page rather, put them in separate file (.css file) and clean your css code.

7. Optimize CSS by aggregating together dispersed codes, e.g Convert this:
margin-top: 5px
margin-right: 10px
margin-bottom: 5px
margin-left: 10px
To single: margin: 5px 10px 5px 10px

8. Optimize images. Use ‘save for web‘ tool on Photoshop or other image optimizer to convert images for web use after design.

9.Minimize the number of objects on your site like images, header, tables,etc. This will reduce HTTP request.

10. Combine request for external files or scripts, e.g
<link rel= “stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/bogy.css” />
<link rel= “stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/side.css” />
<link rel= “stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/footer.css” />
should be integrated as
<link rel= “stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/style.css” />

11. Ensure you split up every JavaScript and defer their loading

12. It is important to minimize redirects.

13. Ensure every unique page has single URL. So, canonical issues must be resolve.

14. Don’t engage in cheap hosting. This may adversely affect your site load time especially at peak period.

15. Make sure GZIP compression is set up on your server.

16.It is very important to set up caching on your server. WordPress has plugins for this e.g W3 Total Cache, Quick Cache, etc.

Contact us should you need help in this regard or would like us to setup a blog for you at no cost. We shall be glad to assist you all the way and don’t forget to check your website loading time. Your success is our passion.