How to Speed Up Your Website / Blog

Most of the webmasters are aware of the importance of the loading speed of their website. However, for anyone who doesn’t know the importance of the speed of your website, here are some reasons.

• Loading speed has a significant “weight” in all the major search engine algorithms. That means it is essential that you have a high loading speed in order to rank higher in search engines, like Google.
• Remember the time you used to wait for few seconds for a website or computer to respond to a mouse click. Well, that time is long gone. Nowadays, 400 milliseconds, literally the blink of an eye, is too long. So, it is important that your website loads fast, in order to give your visitors a better surfing experience. You have an average of four seconds. If your website doesn’t load within that time, a majority of the users will leave even before the webpage is fully loaded, therefore, your site will show a higher bounce rate.
• 250 milliseconds – if one of your competitor’s site is faster than your site by 250 milliseconds (1 millisecond = 1/1000 second), the users will visit their site more often than yours.

How to speed up your website

There are number of tools out in the market that you can use to measure the speed of your website. Some even provide tips on how to improve your site loading speed. So if you have already checked the speed of your site, we will move forward and check out some tricks you can use to speed up your website.

• Optimizing the Images

Make your images as small as possible. Most of today’s photo-editing software, like Photoshop, has an inbuilt optimization tool. Alternatively, there are many free tools you can download, in order to help you optimize your images. Most of the images contain a ton of unnecessary details on them, making the size of them bigger. You can use optimization tools to cut off these excessive details and reduce the image sizes.

• Image Format

While using too many images can slow down your website, correctly using image formats like jpg (jpeg), gif and png can help speed up your website. Usually it is better to use jpg for photographs, gif for logos & animations, and PNG for single-images, which has more than 256 colors.

• Make CSS and JavaScript External

When CSS and JavaScript files are used as external files, they get cached by the browsers, whereas inline JavaScript and CSS inside an html file need to be downloaded every time that page is requested.

• Reduce plugins and widgets

Installing too many plugins can dramatically slow down your site. Always check and remove all the plugins that you don’t use anymore. While you are at it, do not forget to clean up the widgets that are no longer necessary.

• Web Hosting

There are many hosting service providers in the market today. And all of them offer one or all three of the main web hosting solutions, Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Hosting.

If you are using a shared hosting service, you have no way to check how many other websites are hosted on the same server. If the hosting service provider hosts a large number of websites on the same server, it could limit the bandwidth and slow down your website. Furthermore, if one of the users on your server uses most of the resources on it, it would also make your site slowdown.

VPS hosting solutions makes it possible for you to have a portion of the resources of the physical server dedicated to your needs. You will have a dedicated amount of bandwidth, which means that none of the other users on your physical server will be able to use the bandwidth you own. And with a VPS, you will also get dedicated RAM, which could make overall speed of your website go up. And you can always buy VPS hosting for a cheaper price than dedicated server hosting, which allows you to use a single physical server by yourself. However, if you are handling a huge corporate website, you might want to go for dedicated hosting.