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5 Tips to Speed Up Your Website
A painfully slow website is almost as bad as having no website at all. With broadband connectivity and superfast processors, consumers are accustomed to everything on the Internet working quickly and without much hassle.
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Gone are the days of dial-up modems where loading a page took a lot more than a few seconds. Instead, people want content to be fully in front of them within moments of their click. You probably want the same thing for your customers, so follow some of these tips to help your website run faster.
Consider a Content Delivery Network
Better known as CDNs, these networks take the static files from a website and move them to servers closer to a user’s physical location, helping them load faster. This is a trick many large companies use to ensure a fast experience wherever users log in.
Put Your Pictures on a Diet
Images help to enhance a website, but they also account for 61 percent of a website’s digital weight. Using different image formats such as WebP and Jpeg XR can reduce the amount of data your images take up without a reduction in quality. The end result is a faster website and better experience for the customer.
Use Plugins Judiciously
Plugins are a wonderful way to bring functionality to a website, but they are also one of the top things that crash on a website or cause latency. Look to remove ones that duplicate functionality, are out of date, or that are rarely used. When building a site, it is easy to go heavy with the plug ins, but too many can really slow down your site. Make sure you get value from the each and every one you use.
Think About Compression
Websites can be compressed like programs you put into a Zip file. By compressing your site, you reduce the number of bytes a page sends of the network. There are a number of programs like Apache that will do this for you. You can also optimize your content for compression with consistency across HTML and CSS codes, taking complexity out of the equation.
Talk to Your Host
Some of these steps may help you, but if they don’t then talk to your hosting provider. You may need a new package. Some hosting providers share server space between clients, so if your site shares technology with another site you may feel the effects. You might want to look then to upgrading your package, finding a different host or considering alternatives like dedicated hosting.
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