The internet is fast, but some websites are faster than others. People want their sites to load quickly and efficiently. They also want them to be secure and reliable. When you optimize your website for speed, you can attract new customers who will leave positive reviews on Google and other search engines, which means more organic traffic from potential new customers!
Why is website speed optimization important?
If your site is slow, people will leave. It’s as simple as that. They may not come back to visit or even share the content with others. It can be frustrating to have a website that takes forever to load on your phone or computer, especially when there are so many options out there that are perfectly optimized and ready to go!
How can you optimize your website speed?
There are a number of things you can do to optimize your website speed. The first thing you should do is check out Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. This will give you an idea of how fast your site loads and what areas need improvement. You can also use tools like Pingdom, GTMetrix or Webpagetest to see how long it takes for each page of your website to load.
Use a good hosting provider.
Choosing a good hosting provider for your website is key to keeping it running smoothly. The first thing you’ll want to do is check out their uptime, which is essentially how long they’ve been up and running without any issues. If they have an average uptime of over 99%, then this could be a sign that you should consider sticking with them for the long term (though this doesn’t mean that there won’t be occasional hiccups).
The second thing you should look at when choosing a host is speed; this can vary significantly depending on what type of server plan you choose and whether or not it’s under load (for example, if there are more visitors than usual). It’s also worth noting that some hosts offer better performance than others—but don’t worry too much about this because most will work just fine!
Finally, make sure your chosen host has excellent customer service availability: if something goes wrong with one aspect of their service (or even something unrelated), then having someone who understands how things work can really help solve problems quickly!
Minify your resources.
The next step is to minify your resources. Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters from your HTML and CSS, such as spaces, line breaks, empty elements and comments. This will reduce the size of your generated file by making it smaller without losing any meaning or functionality.
You can minify all HTTP responses by adding ?gzip=1&compress_data=0 to http://yoursite/index.html before serving it back to browsers (or check out this resource). However, if you only have JavaScript files on your page then there are already some tools that do that for you!
With these simple steps in mind: Minification is important because it reduces the size of each asset so they load faster into users’ browsers – which leads us onto our next point…
Reduce the number of plugins used on the site.
Plugin performance is often unpredictable, and many plugins add unnecessary functionality that slows down your website. It’s best to remove all of these if you can, because they will only make things worse for your visitors and may cause errors in their experience with your site as well as its performance.
How many plugins should you keep? That depends entirely on what kind of functionality each plugin provides and how much time it takes to use those features, so it’s hard to give an exact answer here (but don’t worry—we’ll cover some general guidelines below). You might want one or two simple ones like RevSlider or Contact Form 7 to help provide basic functionality like displaying contact form fields correctly on each page; however if there are multiple pages within an article that need different styles/layouts then consider using a lightweight theme such as Twenty Fourteen instead unless you prefer having full control over styling everything yourself!
Optimize HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.
- Use a cache-friendly file structure. Caching is the process of storing frequently accessed content in memory for quick access later on, rather than downloading it from your server to the browser as you need it. When you use a file structure that’s optimized for caching, it makes sense to store all images and other static assets in one place so they can be served quickly using CDNs (content delivery networks).
- Use compression software with minification tools on every image file or JavaScript library that isn’t essential to the experience of using your site.
For example: if you’re using an image editor like Photoshop or Gimp, then use Gimp’s built-in optimizer tool before saving an image; otherwise try ImageOptim instead which works well with most photo editing programs too!
Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content.
JavaScript and CSS files are often blocked by the browser, which means that the browser cannot render the page until they have been downloaded. This can lead to a slower experience for users because they will be waiting longer for pages to load on their devices.
Perform image compression and optimization.
Image optimization and compression is a must if you want to increase website speed. You’ll need to use a lossless image format, such as PNG or JPEG, which will compress your images without losing quality.
It’s also best practice to use compression tools like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP (which is free). These programs can help you find and optimize specific aspects of your images before uploading them onto the web server.
You can improve performance by using CDNs (content delivery networks) for your site’s images; this means that instead of downloading all those files from the server itself, they’ll be served from the nearest location with high-speed connections available at all times—even during peak times!
Reduce Image and File size
The next step is to reduce the size of your images. This can be done by compressing them, or using a content delivery network (CDN).
If you’re using WordPress, there are plugins like WP Minify and GZIP that will do this for you. All major browsers support HTML5 and CSS3 images but not all of them have full support for PNGs yet—so don’t worry about that if you’re still using Internet Explorer!
It’s not hard to find articles on how to optimize your website speed. But what if I told you that there are other ways to do so? In this article, we’ve covered seven different strategies for improving the performance of your site. You may have already heard about some of them through social media or Google before reading this article, but others may be new for you. But don’t worry! We will cover some great tips on optimizing images and eliminating render-blocking JavaScript in a future blog post as well