This is a question that many people ask themselves after getting their first website up and running. There really is something magical and liberating about taking nothing and making something out of it. This is what makes many webmasters stick with the trade for years to come. Even here at Ignite Digital, we get a rush every time we launch a website. However, there is something that makes you want to claw your own eyes out when you tell your friends to go look and they tell you:
“paint dries quicker than this site loads”
The good news is that no matter why your website loads, even if your website takes 2 hours to watch 60 Minutes, you can make your site load faster with a few quick and easy tips. Of course, depending on how your site is constructed there are some of the tips listed below that will not help in certain cases.
5 Tips To Speed Up Your Website Load Time
1. Change Hosts
This can be a huge bottleneck and a fast and easy problem to fix. In fact there are hundreds of hosts out there that are so darn slow it doesn’t make a difference what your website is like, the response times will be slow. Shared hosting plans are cheap and just like they say, “You get what you pay for”. Sometimes it is best to spend a few more dollars on hosting to get the speed you need.
Note: Selfish plug of our Website Hosting service.
2. Get Rid Of Fatty Images
Yup, sometimes this can make a huge difference in load speed. We are not going to get into interlaced VS non-interlaced and difference between file types here, but if you can actually size your images correctly and save them as web JPG files, for the most part you will see a difference immediately. When you use html or other code to resize images, the whole image still needs to load and then be resized, so there is no savings in using size to shrink you pics.
3. If You Use PHP, Turn On Compression
This can make pages load 66% faster if your server support compression. Just ask your host for help and you should be in business. This works with all the popular CMS platforms like Drupal, WordPress and Joomla.
4. Remove Some Plugins
Many times people go a little crazy with plugins. If you can go down the list and remove the ones that are not integral to your website, the speed gods will reward you!
5. Remove Old & Excess Code
Look, if you are still using Frontpage to make a website, you are filling pages worth of code into your html documents that do nothing but slow down your site. Also, if you can move forward into the future and use CSS styles instead of HTML tables, this is going to help you considerably too. Give your website a spring cleaning on the code side and you may be surprised what happens to your page loads.
BONUS!
Purchase a Content Delivery Network (CDN), it is extremely affordable and works wonders in your website load time. It essentially in a nut-shell, stores your images or videos on another ‘server’ then when a user calls on that image it loads it. While your website is simultaneously loading other items, all within seconds!
There are many other ways to shed a few extra seconds off of your website’s loading time, but this will surely get you moving in the right direction. Remember, this is no longer a want, but a need. Not only are your viewers being punished when they visit, but Google made it publicly known that they reward faster loading sites with higher rankings. This means you are missing out on free traffic too! The tips listed above will have a quick impact on your websites load time.
So quit watching the paint dry and get your site right, you can of course thank me later.