Speed Up Your Website With These Simple Tips
There are a lot of different components that make up websites. In the past, it wasn’t that complex. HTML 1.0 – HTML 4.0 was a simple language to learn and make websites out of. If you made sites with those languages and you didn’t utilize scripting or flash, or anything else, it would load relatively well. However, the times have changed. The HTML markup language that once reigned is no longer the case. You are going to have to use a lot more to get through the internet with a good website. If you did try to use the past languages, or even some shortcuts, you would have a slow site. If you do not look into how to speed up your website, you are going to end up losing your market share fast. The slower a site is, the less likely it will rise to the top of Google or any other search engine. This has been seen time and time again through the lens of several professional search engine optimization companies. If you want to ensure your site is responsive, and unique, make sure that you take the following notes on how to speed up your website.
Use CloudFlare
This is a free CDN, and it helps sustain your site when something goes wrong. Your web hosting company may give you 99% uptime, but what about that 1%? Well, that’s where this comes into the picture. You can ensure that your clients can reach your site no matter what happens. Not only that, you will have a lot of protection against DOS attacks, and more. This also holds a great deal of your information the cloud, so that your site loads quickly. As far as learning how to speed up your website, this is an important aspect. By having this firmly in place, you are going to end up with a positive solution moving forward. It’s a snappy addition to your site, and something that will save the day if your site goes down, the hosting provider goes down, or you have any sort of issues with loading your pages.
You can signup for CloudFlare for free for one website.
Limit Your Plugins For WordPress
When you are learning how to speed up your website, make sure that you pull in the plugins for WordPress. There’s millions of people using this content management system. However, the peripherals and additional code that you can attach to the framework can slow your page to a slow crawl. It’s an imperative thing that you limit how many you put into place. If you have too many of these in place, the code that has to run in order to showcase your page online or with mobile devices will be excruciating to the end user. It’s with that in mind that you should turn some of these off, delete some, and test the load times appropriately.
Optimize Your Images
Before uploading anything to your site, make sure that you have the right compression ratio. Furthermore, look at making sure that you edit and optimize every image that you put into place. That means creating a profile for every image that is within the faster loading profiles. Let’s assume that you’re going to work on several images. Go into your favorite editor and optimize the output to speed up. When in doubt, focus on jpeg formats that are 72DPI and are not resized within the markup language of your site. When looking at how to speed up your website, optimize every single image you are going to upload. This will give you a major push forward.
If you use Adobe Photoshop there is an option under the File menu called ‘Save For Web’. This option will allow you to save your image and optimize it for the web.
CSS and JavaScript Placement
Perhaps one of the harder parts to learn when you are looking at how to speed up your website, is this. You should utilize your CSS tags at the upper half of your website and the scripting at the bottom. Not only that, experiment with calling sheets and scripting away from your immediately loading pages. You could also script it to load specific rules in place first, second, and third. This is all an advanced element that you should not discount. It’s easy to lose sight of this. Take your time and focus on placing the right elements in regards to the code structure of your page. Remember, SEO doesn’t just relegate your pages structure to keyword and content alone. You have to look into speed, as a feather in the proverbial cap.
At the end of the day, the aforementioned are just some of the major tips to help you speed up your website. If you take them to heart, and work them out, your page will not only rank towards the top of search engine results, it will become more responsive across several platforms.
As an example, if you use Google Analytics you should place the javascript provided by Google in your footer.php file not the header.php
Speeding up your website will keep visitors active on your website and improve their overall experience.
