So, you own a website. How fast is it?
If your website isn’t that fast, you could be operating at a major disadvantage. Speeding it up, however, is not an easy task. There are a couple of things you can do to make sure that your website is smooth and efficient. They’re pretty quick solutions to ensure speed, too.
Listed below is five quick solutions for making sure that your website stays performing at an optimal level.
The Right Hosting
The right hosting platform or package is vital for getting the best results.
The hosting that you have can make all the difference when it comes to the speed of your website. A properly-hosted website will be fast and responsive, which helps a lot.
If you want to pick the right hosting, shop around and see what’s on offer for yourself. Cheap hosting is a big no!
Optimise Your Images
One of the fastest ways to make sure that your site runs quickly is to make sure you optimise your images. When your images are not optimised it blocks the rendering of the page and make the web page feel slow to load.
One of the first things you can do is resize your images so the optimun size for the page, but you can also make sure you use a modern image format like WebP or AVIF. Modern Content Managment Sytem will do the conversion of image types as you upload to the website.
It is also a good idea to make sure you do what is known as “lazy loading” your images. This means the user only downloads thw images at the point they require to see them as they scroll. This would need to be done within your websites template code.
Caching
Caching of your website creates a static version of your pages. This can be a great performance win as it reduces the time to deliver the content from your database. This improves the page load time of your web page to your end user. This also helps with SEO as page speed is a ranking factor.
Compress CSS and Javascript
The code that built your website is very important. However, there is a difference between compressed and uncompressed code.
HTML, CSS, and JS minification reduces the size of the files delevired to the browser, this means the browser can parse it quicker and render the page faster.
Use a CDN
You might not think that the geographical distance from a server means anything. However, it can actually increase loading times. Therefore, you need to get a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
Essentially, the CDN works via a global series of servers which replicate the assets of the website such as images, javascipt and CSS.
There are many CDN services on the market, all with their own functionality. Cloudflare is one I use the most and is easy to set up and certainly one I would recommend. It is also a WordPress module which I have seen make a great difference to the page speed score of a website.
As you can see there are some quick wins, the ones mentioned above really should all be addressed at the build stage of your website, as incorporates modern best practices of building a website.
If you want to get in touch about thw speed of your website please get in contact here.