10 Quick Tips To Speed Up Your Website

So your website loads slower then old people Fu%@ing. Nobody likes a slow website, not the search bots, and especially not people who will leave rather then wait for a page that takes forever to load, let’s be honest our attention span is getting shorter all the time. On top of that Google’s recent Panda update looks at a sites load time to determine where it’s going to site in search results, either way you look at it your website loading time is a big deal.

So how do you speed up your website loading time? Here’s a list of 10 tips for optimizing your website to load faster

1. Get rid of anything you don’t need

The first thing you should look at when looking at how to speed up your website is figure out exactly what you need and what’s just excess fluff. The more items on your page the more it’s going to slow down. Get rid of any images, flash, widgets, embedded sound files, I-frames or anything else that you don’t need on your page.

2. Shrink images

Images are great to have but can really drive up your websites load time. Depending on what kind of website builder you’re using there are a couple of ways you can shrink your images. The easiest one is to simply shrink the image on the page and make it smaller. The second and better solution is to use an image optimizer to shrink the file size. Sites like Site Report Card

Offer a free image optimizer. What I like about this site is that once you optimize the image you can view and select different versions of that image depending on how much file space you want to save.

3. Remove extra whitespace

Another way to speed up load time is to get rid of excess whitespace. This is space between your coding. By removing the unneeded tabs and space you can save a lot of space and take a big chuck out of your websites loading time. Be careful if your using an automatic squisher though, as this can make editing elements on that page more difficult in the future.

4. Split up long pages

Do your pages look like a novel? If they do break them up into smaller chunks, this has several benefits not just to your load time but in keeping people’s interests in your content. From an SEO perspective this also helps because each page can target different keywords which can attract even more visitors.

5. Install Google page speed

Google’s page speed is a free tool that runs a performance test based on a set of criteria and gives your web page a score between 0 to 100. It also displays a list of areas that you need to work on. To check it out you can follow the link here.

6. Reduce your code

The more HTML code blocks your website has the slower it’s going to run. Depending on what king of site editor your using try clustering together any code that’s going to be near each other rather then having everything in a separate box.

7. Pick the right format for your images

The right image format can make a big difference on your sites performance. Make sure to use GIF or PNG on images that are buttons or logos. While regular images should be in JPEG format.

8. Avoid flash

While flash has made some improvements especially with being SEO friendly, it still takes a lot longer to load. Use too much of it and your page is going to take forever to load up. My advice, avoid it unless you absolutely need to use it.

9. Use a quality host

This one might be obvious but who hosts your site can make a difference in how well your site performs. As your site becomes more popular the demands on your host provider increase. If there some small company with few resources you’ll need to switch to someone who can handle that level of traffic.

10. Host your videos with a 3rd party

Videos can suck up a lot of bandwidth, so rather then having them hosted directed on your site use a source like YouTube, Vimeo, or Dailymotion to display your videos. The added benefit of doing this is that those videos can then be viewed outside your site while providing back links to it.