How can you speed up your website?
No amount of hours of training on a treadmill will make your website fast. Reach out to your web developer to get the ball rolling. There are several aspects that your developer can help with starting with these:
• Image Size: Always make sure the images and photos are sized appropriately for where they appear on the page and compressed using compression services. Never, ever, upload the original photo directly from your camera without first resizing and compressing. Our favourite compression services are imagerecycle.com and tinypng.com. Google, and the people who use your site, will appreciate the lean optimized image files.
• Server performance: The next most significant factor in page speed is server performance. Ensure you are on a fast and reliable web hosting platform that can deliver your website quickly. Often discount shared hosting means your website may be impacted by the performance and bandwidth of all the other sites it communicates with.
• Coding best practice: This will require implementing some critical best procedures of minifying client-side coding and placing code files at the bottom of the pages. There are several tools your developer can use to sort through the complexity of code optimization. Our favourite tool for testing performance is Google PageSpeed Insights and Webpage Test.
• Database queries: Most websites use databases and queries to manage content, and by default, these queries are generally not optimized. Have your developer review the database queries to ensure they are optimized and only returning the data that will be used on the website. Efficient queries will go a long way to delivering dynamic content fast.