3 Easy Ways to Significantly Speed up your Website

In our last blog post we promised to show you 3 easy ways to significantly speed up your website – so here you go!

The main problems with site speed or the time it takes a site to load are related to the size of the files that are relayed from the server that the website lives on to the users browser.

Think of all of those images, css files, javascript files, and the rest of the html, text, etc.

All of this takes up space, and so if you can reduce it then your site will load faster – simple!

So to speed up your site significantly go through these 3 steps:

1) ZLIB Compression

This could speed up the delivery of your site by making it load up to 4 times faster!

To use this you need to have ZLIB compression enabled on your server – there is a simple method to find out (see the link below), or you could just ask.

If you do have ZLIB compression enabled, then it’s a simple matter of adding 2 lines of code at the top of the header.php file (assuming you’re using Wordpress or some other dynamic website platform), or at the top of your static html files, and your server will do the rest.

Your site is delivered in compressed form, the users browser will unpack it and display the site!

Rather than me just repeating what’s been said elsewhere, you can just follow this link to find out more – you can even test the speed of your site afterwards to make sure it’s compressing properly.

2) GZip Compression

Although ZLIB compression works wonders, it doesn’t address the problem of the size of css files and javascript files, to reduce the size of these we use GZip compression.

First of all you should check to see whether you can reduce the number of css and javascript files by combining them together, so that only one file needs to be called, rather than lots of them.

You can also strip out comments and white spaces/blank lines from your files to make them even smaller.

Once you’ve done this you can happily GZip the files and you will now have an even faster site!

If you use wordpress then there is a GZip plugin or 2 available – we won’t recommend one here, since new plugins are continuously coming out, and old ones might stop working with newer versions of Wordpress.

Just check the plugins section at Wordpress and find the best and latest version.

3) Crunch your Images

Obviously one of the biggest file sizes on many sites will be the images, including logos, etc.

If you can reduce the image sizes then this will also help to tremendously speed up your site.

We use the free version of a program called Pixillion to reduce our image sizes, you can easily cut the file size by 50% without seeing much of a change in the visual qualities of the image, sometimes more – this can save some serious bandwidth.

If you follow all 3 of the simple steps outlined above then you will see that you can quickly and dramatically increase your websites speed.

You might even see that your conversion rates increases too, and you won’t need to even dream (or have nightmares about) moving your site to another host!

How important is site speed for seo?

You might have noticed recently that Google have started to press the issue over site speed and how well websites will rank, but just how important is site speed?

We’ve had discussions recently with people who have been contacted by a number of hosting companies who supposedly have very fast servers.

What they are basically doing is trying to frighten people into moving all of their sites to them, because if they don’t “they’ll stop showing up in Google!”

Whilst Google are pushing for a faster web, since this enhances the surfing experience, it is, as they readily point out, only one of over 200 factors that determine ranking, so clearly no one is going to drop off the Earth because their site is too slow – at least not yet!

We should always bear in mind that Googles core business objective is to deliver relevant results – not the fastest websites – and if they did just return the fastest sites, then clearly that would be at the expense of the most relevant results, which would clearly be unacceptable.

So at the moment your site speed should not be anything to worry too much about from a ranking and seo point of view.

However… it is always desirable to give your visitors the best experience possible, which includes not having to sit their waiting for each page to load.

There is no doubt that a slow site will result in lower conversion rates, and so there is a compelling reason to make your site as fast as it can be anyway.

For many people the thought of moving their site to a new server will send shivers down their spine, and with good reason, but there are a couple of ways that you can speed up your website tremendously without having to move servers at all!

Well cover these in the next blog post “3 Easy Ways to Significantly Speed up your Website”