Speed is an important aspect when building a website. The faster your website loads, the more visitors it will attract which ultimately leads to more enquires and more sales.
There are a number of things that can be done to improve your website load speed. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Get a fast web server
Having a fast, responsive web server is a must. Whatever you did to optimize the speed of your website you did in vain if the server is overloaded.
If you’ve a simple website with few visitors then shared hosting is fine. For a website getting popular, it might be a good idea to switch to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with guaranteed RAM & CPU usage. If the website is already popular, a dedicated server will be the best performing one.
2. Optimize images
Know when to use GIF, JPG and PNG files. Optimizing your images will dramatically reduce their size and they will still look good on the web.
GIF is suitable for images with few colors like logos, text & line art. When saving a GIF file, make sure you use a small color palette.
JPG is good for images with lots of colors & details like photographs. Decrease the quality of a JPG image before saving. It will still look good on a screen.
PNG, a format specially for websites, has great quality – both transparent & non-transparent – is specially functional when you’re in need of quality transparent images.
Always use the “Save for Web” tool in Photoshop, to compress your images in order to lower their size.
You can also use the Smush.It tools to take the compression even further without sacrificing quality.
3. Use XHTML/CSS for layout rather than tables
Tables are rendered slower than CSS by browsers. When using CSS, you can do more with less code. CSS-only website is more compatible with web browsers (including mobile browsers), has better SEO and loads faster.
4. Compress your CSS and Javascript files
Optimizing your CSS stylesheets and merging your Javascript files to reduce HTTP requests is another thing you can to to decrease your site’s load time.
You can also Compress your CSS files (you may try this, this or this) and Compress JavaScript files. It lowers the size seriously & doesn’t have any bad effects on your side. This & this are some of the popular compressors.
5. Use HTTP compression
HTTP compression is one of the most effective step with a little effort.
Today, almost every browser & web server supports HTTP compression. Using it, your files are sent to the visitor compressed & un-compressed on their side & you can have up to 90% success for the text based files (like HTML).
You have 2 popular choices with this:
- HTTP compression: a feature of the web server (can be enabled on the server side)
- Gzip: can be enabled at the site level. Here are more details.
- Further readings: HTTP Compression at Wikipedia
6. Cache web pages
Caching is a superb way of decreasing the stress on the server by running more static files & less queries. It simply saves a static, HTML version of the page to be displayed & displays that file rather than the dynamic one.
For CMS applications like Wordpress, there are already ready-to-use caching plugins (like WP-Cache). For PHP, here is a great article from SitePoint.
A small note, caching can also be done at the web server level. Unfortunately majority of shared web hosting plans do not offer server-side caching at this time.
Free tools
If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
- In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below.We also recommend reading Google’s post about site performance.
- Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.
What do you suggest?
Do you have any other tips to make websites load faster? Please do share them with our readers.
Tags: Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Technology, Tips, Web Design