Having a fast websites is important for a number of reasons. Several years ago, Google announced speed as a signal used in its search ranking algorithm, meaning fast-loading websites will receive a slight boost rankings boost. Furthermore, Amazon conducted a study in which it found that for every 100ms visitors were forced to wait resulted in a 1% decrease in sales. Now for the million dollar question: how do I speed up my website?
Shrink Images
One of the easiest ways to speed up a website is to shrink the images. Most webmasters upload raw images in their original form. A smarter and more efficient solution is to run the images through a tool such as Yahoo’s Smush.it beforehand. Smush.it is a lossless tool, meaning it reduces the image file size without altering the image’s appearance or quality. Just visit the link previously mentioned and either upload your images or enter the URL where your images are located. Alternatively, you can download and use the Smush.it plugin for WordPress.
Content Delivery Network
Using a content delivery network (CDN), such as CloudFlare or Amazon Cloudfront, may also reduce your site’s load times. A CDN consists of a network of datacenters spread across the globe. When a visitor accesses your website, the CDN will use the datacenter closest to his or her physical location. If you live in the U.S. and someone is attempting to access your website from the U.K., the CDN will serve files from a U.K.-based datacenter. Reducing the physical distance between the visitor and your website’s files will reduce load times.
Enable GZIP Compression
Enabling GZIP compression on your server can reduce HTML and CSS file sizes by as much as 50%. Normally, browser requests return full, unaltered files. With GZIP compression enabled, however, your server will return compressed files, which are inherently smaller and thus load faster.
To enable GZIP compression, add the following code to your site’s .htaccess file:
<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>
Web Hosting
Of course, your web host will also affect your site’s load times. Opting for a cheap shared account may save you some cash upfront, but it will end up costing you more in the form of long load times. Instead of shared hosting, consider using either a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server).
