A Fast Website is A Good Website
See, if you keep em’ waiting, there’re going to go elsewhere.
The thing about visitors to your website is that most of them don’t like to wait for your website to load.
So how do you improve your website’s speeds?
There are some tricks that you can pull to make it faster, especially for mobile sites.
A Quick History of Making Websites Fast
With the rise of the smart phone, and other internet connected devices, that were not a desktop or a laptop. website developers realized that they would have to prioritize streamlining and catering to these mobile devices.
The first stab at this was to basically ask the device visiting the page if it was a “mobile” device, and serve it a different, stripped down version of the web page.
This method eventually resulted in AMP or accelerated mobile pages. Versions of web pages that were supposed to be fast, but better looking than the previously very spartan pages that most phones were being given.
However, as mobile devices and mobile network speeds have improved there has been less and less reason to put in the additional effort in trying to build what amounted to a second version of your website just for phones.
However, that does not mean that today we don’t have to make sure that our websites are mobile friendly. If anything, it’s even more important.
So how do I optimize my site speed?
Improving your website’s speed is going to vary in the exact implementation depending on what kind of content management platform you are using.
However, there are some universally applicable things that I can suggest to get you started.
Odds are you are using WordPress, as it is an incredibly popular platform for creating websites without having to code everything by hand. Heck, we use it for Heartless.
Because of this there are many plug-ins that speed improvements to your website, such as WP-Optimize that will help automate the processes and make it more user friendly.
Adding Caching
Caching essentially lets you pre-render each page on your website before a visitor’s computer asks for it. Allowing for less work to be done by your visitor’s machine and less data going back and forth.
WordPress has many caching plugins, and some can work with more advanced, server-side caching features. Or you can implement caching in other ways to help speed up your website.
Reduce Image Sizes
Smaller images let pages load faster and perform better on slower connections. There are many plugins that can help you do this automatically for WordPress and other content management platforms.
Additionally, there are many free tools online that will help you compress your images such as the ImageCompressor.com by Optimizilla
Minify CSS and Java Script
If you are not familiar with the terms, CSS, or cascading style sheets, control the look and feel of your website. They define fonts, colors, layout of text and more.
Java Script is often used to help run more advanced functions of your website such as interactive elements.
Both can increase the size of the webpage when downloaded and can often be “minified”.
This uses techniques such as putting the code “inline” with the rest of the code for the page. This can mean a user goes from having to download three files (an HTML file, a CSS file, and a JS file) to only having to download one.
Though with most modern websites things are not going to be as straight forward.
A plugin to do one thing might have its own CSS and Java Script files that get loaded separately.
So, you often end up with pages that are requesting multiple CSS, Java Script, and other files to run. With minification, you’re combining these files into fewer files. Reducing the number of files that need to be downloaded by your visitors to “render” the page.
Fortunately, many popular content management systems, like WordPress have plugins or tools to make this easier without you having to code everything by hand.
Minimize External Scripting Use
Java Script, and other code, also doesn’t have to come from your website. Some functions may need external resources or scripts to function. Google Tag manager, or Facebook log-in are some examples.
Limit the number of external requests for resources to only what is necessary for a page to function.
Leverage a content delivery network (CDN)
A content delivery network helps to spread out the work for your website’s server to deliver a website to a visitor across multiple servers instead of just one.
In very simple terms, you have one server sending your visitor images, another sending HTML files, and maybe a third sending scripting files, instead of one having to do the work of sending all of those files to your visitor.
This is an overly simplistic explanation, but a CDN helps speed up your website and lets your website handle more visitors as well.
Advanced Optimizations
Going beyond the basics you could also implement additional tricks to make your website load faster and be more responsive to the user.
Controlling what resources are loaded is a good place to start. A contact form plugin may load its code on every page, but you only need it for one. By limiting resources to only what is necessary for a page to function correctly, you can reduce the size of your website’s pages and improve performance.
Another advanced technique is to start “prefetching” pages before they are clicked on. Pulling the files for another internal webpage before the link is clicked on.
Some of these more advanced techniques and clever optimizations such as using sprites for all images to cut down image requests can be seen in an excellent break down of the McMaster-Carr website in the video below.
Wrapping Up
This guide just scratches the surface of website optimization, but it will give you an idea of what you should be looking at to get started.
Fast websites have many positive effects. Google and other search engines value metrics like site speed when they look for a “quality” website.
Yet, more importantly, a fast website contributes to a user’s experience and if the website is fast and responsive. A visitor is more likely to stay and convert into a customer.
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