Speeding Up Your Website A Quick Overview

Speeding Up Your Website – A Quick Overview

Making a website a success is tough in 2016. There is lots of competition, some would argue too much but personally I think competition is a good thing. Unfortunately, unless you’re promoting a unique product or service you’re going to have someone competing against you. It is because of this that you will need to pull out all the stops if you’d like to make your own site a success.

One huge factor that often gets overlooked is how a quick website can help both your promotional endeavours, conversion rates and ultimately customer retention. In a world where you need to gain every advantage over the next guy having a fast website may just be the thing that sets you apart from the competition. There are certainly no negative aspects to having a fast website and given that you can pretty much go from having a slow website to a super-fast website with just a few hours work it definitely seems like a no brainer to me.

Why Speed is Important

Speed is important for many reasons. The obvious one being that your customers, well, potential customers do not want to wait any real length of time for your website to load – and why would they? If the guy below you on Google for example is offering the same sort of thing you are, any slow loading website is just going to encourage your visitor to hit the back button and visit the other guy instead.

Google unfortunately can witness this happening via their software and if you have a large amount of people hitting the back button because your website is taking too long to load you’re not going to have a prominent ranking for very long. It’s a huge factor these days and something which needs serious consideration.

The bottom line though is that people don’t have the time to be waiting around for your pretty website to load on your slow web host. They want the information and they want it now and in a world where patience in general wears thin, quickly, you need to pull out all the stops to please your visitors.

The Art of Minifying

Minifying is one of those things which should be common practise but simply isn’t! Minifying your JS and CSS files can knock whole seconds off your page load time – which might not sound a lot but in reality, it’s huge!

In short, all that whitespace, new lines, spaces etc that are not needed in a JS or CSS file take up bytes. Bytes take up disk space and bytes take time to reach your visitors computer from your web host. Minifying essentially removes any whitespace/new lines which are not needed so in some cases you can half the filesize of your included files and in turn make the transfer speed from your web host to your visitors computer much quicker.

Plugins and Software

With website speed becoming such a huge concern for many webmasters. The market for software that helps with such a task is blossoming. There seems to be new modules coming on the market on pretty much a daily basis that can help with speeding up your site.

Popular applications such as Varnish Cache and Google PageSpeed can work wonders in speeding up your page load time when used in conjuction with some good old fashioned housekeeping such as the minifying as mentioned above.

If you’re using plugins though, especially with the likes of WordPress, you need to be careful that the files included by your new plugins do not take up more space than they save. There is no real gain to be had by shaving 1mb off your total page size if your plugin is including 2mb of JS!

Resources and Tools

Like with the plugins there are lots of tools out there that analyse your page as a third party and basically report back where you’re going wrong. GTMetrix is a popuplar choice on that front as not only will it tell you what the issues are with your site it will also tell you how to resolve them.

Conclusion

So hopefully this quick overview will provide some food for thought with regards to speeding up your website and website speed in general. A quick clean up and installing some of the applications I’ve mentioned should take no more than a couple of hours at best. Perhaps a bit more if you don’t know what you’re doing but certainly no more than an afternoon. As you can probably see, the benefits by far outweigh the time you’ll potentially need to spend on a task such as this so it should most definitely be considered by all of those who are serious about their online endeavours.

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