5 tips for site speed optimization: make your website load faster (Site Speed Tips Part 4)

So what can you do to make your site load faster?

Well, you can optimize your images. Don’t go and take a DSLR photo and then upload it right to your site onto a page, that’s like 10 megabytes. Remember, the goal is less than one megabyte so those high-res photos, even from your iPhone, even from your smartphone, those photos can be four or five, six megabytes sometimes. So you want to optimize your images, there’s plugins for most content management systems that can do that or a designer can optimize your images for the web.

Speaking about plugins, I see this all the time, I see content management systems that have all these plugins, they’re riddled with plugins, half of them we’re not even using. And you may not know those plugins are loading files in the background that are slowing down your site, you know? So what you want to do is get rid of those plugins. You want to do an audit, say, “What are we using, what aren’t we using?” Let’s get rid of the stuff we’re not using, reduce the weight of our page, of our site. Other stuff you can do: (And this is where you might want to bring a developer in.)

You want to minimize the file sizes and the number of files that you’re loading. So if you’re loading, you know, 100 Javascript files or 100 CSS files and then all these images on top, all those requests going back and forth from your browser to the server, the more requests there are, the more time it takes. So you want to minimize the size of the files and the number of files that load. Speaking of developers, developers are doing something called lazy loading these days and you’ve probably seen this. You load a website and everything above the fold loads quickly and first.

So you see the content above the fold, then as you start scrolling, you can see more content, more images, more interactive, engaging elements start to load and what they’re doing there is, they’re saying, “okay, load just maybe half my website first and then as the user starts to scroll, load the next 25%, or the next 50%” It’s called lazy loading and a developer can help you implement that.

I think the fastest way to speed up your site is to use a content delivery network or a CDN. These are things that, they’re gonna speed up the number of requests going back and forth to the servers to make the requests happen asynchronously and your page load faster. So again, a lot of developer-speak here, using weird words like asynchronously. If you know what that means, that’s great.

If not, that’s what we’re here for or that’s what maybe your development team is here for. They can show you how to do this stuff and can do it for you, but remember, it’s a big deal for user experience. Not just for user experience but for search engine optimization too. Thanks for taking the time, be easy and reduce your weight.