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10 Simple Tips To Speed Up Websites

How to Simply Speed up websites

How to Speed Up Websites Image
Courtesy – Flickr

Speed is important. All of us have a lot of work to do and not enough time to do them. Time management is crucial. Saving times saves money. We expect our trains, cars, taxis etc to go fast. So your website should load fast too. Read on to know how you can also simply speed up websites without much trouble.

Why is speed important?

If your website loads in a zap your users will be happy. Also if your website loads like a turtle, you are in trouble. People will not wait a full 5 or 10 seconds to wait for your site to load. They will simply press the back button and blacklist you in their mind. So, yes speed is important from a human perspective.

Other than this also you should speed up websites you own or administer to gain better search engine rankings. Google does look favorably at those sites that are fast. No wonder Google’s own pages load in no time. So it is highly recommended you speed up websites. At least yours 🙂

The 10 Simple Tips To Speed Up Websites

1. Compress Images – Use images wisely. If your site is not dealing with fashion or photography, having HD images won’t do you any good. Consider scaling them down and also compress them as JPEG.

2. Remove or limit flash content – Flash is heavy and takes a lot of time to load. Besides it is not indexed by search engines. You are better off without it if you wish to speed up websites.

3. Limit the number of widgets – Don’t overcrowd your website with a lot of widgets or third party code. They increase DNS lookups and reduce page load speed.

4. Minify and GZip Javascript and CSS – Minify and Gzip your javascript and CSS to reduce their size. These methods can reduce your Javascript and CSS size by upto 90 percent!

5. Load Javascript at the end and CSS in the beginning – A standard procedure to improve performance is to load the Javascript at the end of your page. Loading CSS in the beginning helps to load the style first.

6. Avoid over-advertising – Excessive ads can slow a site down to a crawl. Keep them low profile and special. You can easily get more revenue by optimizing them and also speed up websites.

7. Keep site malware free Make sure your website is not infected. Many webhosts offer special protection. You can also install plugins to improve the overall security if you are using WordPress. Blogs on blogspot need not worry about security of their blogs.

8. Use a CDN – Content Developer Networks cache static content like images, CSS, or scripts in servers all over the world. They make sure no matter where your users are, they are able to view your site quickly.

9. Cache some content – Caching some content helps a lot as it reduces the load on the server. There are plenty of ways to do that. Go through this once to get more details. Under certain circumstances they do speed up websites, but don’t expect miracle from this.

10. Minimize redirects – To adequately speed up your website you need to make sure the number of redirects are limited as far as possible. More redirects means the browser sends and receives more data to finally load the final content. If you can keep things simple you end up saving a lot of time.

If you have more important points than these top 10 please write in the comments. If you liked this post please consider sharing it. 🙂

By Sarthak Ganguly

A programming aficionado, Sarthak spends most of his time programming or computing. He has been programming since his sixth grade. Now he has two websites in his name and is busy writing two books. Apart from programming, he likes reading books, hanging out with friends, watching movies and planning wartime strategies.

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