Speeding Up Your Web Site:

Speed-up-your-website_by_prashant_walkeWebsite speed is really crucial and thus a faster loading site means better user experience. Indeed, there is no point making an impressive site if it takes much time to load. You may be thinking of why you should give consideration to the website speed. Well, there are a number of facts and reasons behind this, but the most important of them are revenue and search engine rankings.

When you run a business online, your site is the most crucial marketing tool. Thus it makes proper sense to make sure that the site is created to high standards. In fact, there are many things that you need to keep in mind when making a site. The most important of then all is the website speed. Most people do not give this point any consideration and regret later.

Why Should You Speed Up Your WordPress Site?

Much Better Rankings

Matt Cut’s have officially stated that they count page speed as a metric to rank websites. Search engines don’t like slow webpages. They will never want a slow site to be ranked higher up in the SERPs, as it deteriorates their users experience.

Higher Conversion Rate

Increased Traffic

Better User-Experience

This is indeed a very important matter to consider. User experience should be of significant importance to any blogger. A simple way to enhance user experience is to speed up your site. Faster your website loads, better is the user experience. Users are more likely to stay longer on a fast loading website than on a slower one. Thus a simple technique of speeding up your site can drastically increase the on-page time of your visitor’s on your blog.

How To Check Website Speed?speed-up-wordpress-site_by_prashant_walke

There are few online sites who provides your site speed score.

1) :- Google Page Speed Tool :- Visit Site

2) :- gtmetrix.com :- Visit Site

3) :- Pingdom Page Speed Checking tool :- Visit Site

These Tools are very simple to use, Just open any URL and paste your website URL there and Hit Go Button, it will load your website speed overall out of 100.

 

The Optimization Techniques

  • Minify JavaScript and CSS.

JS Compressor

There are a number of online tools available for minimising your javascript. The following tools all require a download and to be run on your machine:

  1. YUI Compressor
  2. JSMin
  3. ShrinkSafe

These tools allow you to paste in/submit your javascript online and get a minimised version back without having to run any programs on your machine:

  1. Packer
  2. JS Minifier

One potential issue with minimising your javascript is the need to keep a minimised version in your codebase for deployment, and an expanded version for development/maintenance. One way around this is to have your webserver look after compression and minimisation of the files in question. This may lead to some additional overhead on your webserver, but you can address this via cache lifetimes etc.

CSS Compressor

Use this Cascading Style Sheets, CSS Compressor to compress CSS to reduce CSS code size and make your web pages load faster.

Checkout this too for CSS: http://www.csscompressor.com/

  • Minimize number of HTTP Requests by combining several files (css, js) into one.

  • Make JavaScript and CSS External

  • Remove Duplicate Scripts

  • No 404s

    HTTP requests are expensive so making an HTTP request and getting a useless response (i.e. 404 Not Found) is totally unnecessary and will slow down the user experience without any benefit.

    Some sites have helpful 404s “Did you mean X?”, which is great for the user experience but also wastes server resources (like database, etc). Particularly bad is when the link to an external JavaScript is wrong and the result is a 404. First, this download will block parallel downloads. Next the browser may try to parse the 404 response body as if it were JavaScript code, trying to find something usable in it.

  • Minimize the Number of iframes

  • Reduce Cookie Size

HTTP cookies are used for a variety of reasons such as authentication and personalization. Information about cookies is exchanged in the HTTP headers between web servers and browsers. It’s important to keep the size of cookies as low as possible to minimize the impact on the user’s response time.

  • Optimize Images

  • Make favicon.ico Small and Cacheable