Website Speed or Page loading time is very important thing to provide great user experience and this has also been proved by our very own Google . If you’re wondering how fast your page load, try this Google Page Speed to see your score.
Below you can find best options to optimize for website speed. Optimizing websites can be fun and we have outlined all the possible things you can do to speed up your website.
Check website First
You can use any of below mentioned online tools to check website speed along with list of recommendations.
Google Pagespeed
Pingdom Tools
GTMetrix
Woorank
Optimize Images
The simplest way to reduce your website load speed – compress your images! As this directly effects your website speed. I have been using this online image compression tool called Tiny JPG or Tiny PNG. You will be surprised how much extra bytes it can take out from your images.
Useful link:
Compressor.io
Optimizilla
Kraken.io
Caching
Database queries are slow, by enabling caching on your website, it transform your dynamic content into static pages so the server doesn’t generate the page for every visitors and thus improves website speed. If you are using WordPress, the popular one is WP Super Cache. If you’re using a custom built one, you can create a simple caching system easily – How to Create a Simple and Efficient PHP Cache. You can also check out the popular Varnish cache.
Use Gzip compression
Gzip is a method of compressing files and deliver it to users, and the client browser will do the compression. It performs best on text-based content such as CSS, HTML and JS. Based on the tests performed by Google, Gzip can reduce JS files by 60-80% and is normally the best & quickest option to improve website speed.
Useful link:
Enable Gzip Compression
Check Gzip Compression
Minify CSS and JS
It’s common for a website to use many Javascript plugins, and CSS files. We can improve website speed by combining all the JS files and also CSS files into a big chuck of minified JS and CSS files. By doing this, we can reduce server request for JS and CSS files. Just two requests, one for JS and one for CSS.
You may want to use Grunt or Gulp as part of your development process by minified your JS and CSS for production. It also have some useful extensions that clean your JS and CSS files too.
Useful link:
Minify – CSS and Javascript minifier
YUI Compressor
Use CDN
If you have a really high traffic website, you can consider Content Delivery Network (CDN), currently the most famous one you would have heard is Amazon Cloudfront. It serves the content based on the location of your visitors, hence it will reduce the load speed dramatically.
Useful link:
Cloudflare
incapsula
Web Hosting
Last but not least, a good web hosting plays an important role in page speed optimization too. We need good performance computer hardware and with the compliment of great software, the server can serve your website quickly.