5 Ways to Boost your Website Speed

With more brands competing for a bigger slice of the visitor traffic, now is the perfect time to laser focus on your website performance. Websites that are not optimized for speed and performance can definitely lead to poor user experience and eventually, your business bottomline.

So, today’s post will give you a rundown of the best tips to help you shave several seconds off your website speed and get the best result thats your visitors will enjoy.

1. Optimize Images

Keep in mind that any image that’s too large in size will considerable amount of time to download compared to if it were compressed. Your web page speed depends on different factors–from your web hosting, user’s browser and Internet connection. Follow these steps to better optimize your images:

• Before uploading images, trim down its size. Any photo editing tool such as Photoshop will do the job just as effectively. Another option is to install a plugin like Smush to automatically compress images in the background.
• If you don’t need to upload that many images, then keep it at a minimum.  
• For photos, use the JPEG format. For logos, icons, headers and signs, PNG is a good choice. GIF is great to showcase simple and/or moving images.

2. Optimize Themes and Plugins

• Make sure that you only install plugins and themes with lightweight codes and less features. Plugins and themes with a slew of unnecessary features could only wear down your site, causing it to load slow.
• Check if there any plugins you don’t use. Delete and uninstall them.
• Once the latest update is available, make sure to update it as soon as possible.

3. Compress Web Pages

• Install third-party plugins like Smart Optimizer and YUI Compressor to minify CSS, Javascript and HTML. Minification is done to reduce any redundant bytes like line break, indentations, and white spaces from the code.
• Compress files by enabling GZIP compression which allows you to compress files that are transmitted from the server to user’s browser.

4. Enable Caching

• If your web host do not offer provider server-side caching, then you can enable caching by installing plugins such as Cache Enabler and W3 Total Cache.
• Use CDN. Many CDN brands offer a 30-day trial to try out their services. However, if you are really serious about accelerating the speed of your website, then we recommend that you upgrade to premium CDN services.  

5. Additional tips:

• Keep externally-embedded media content to a bare minimum.
• As much as possible, reduce the amount of ads on your site.
• Use CSS Sprites to lessen HTTP requests.
• Use a mobile-friendly website design so that your website will render evenly on all types of mobile devices.