How fast is your website? If you have a slow website, it could actually be costing you quite a bit of business. People today want their information as fast as they can get it, and if your site loads slowly, they are simply going to go on and find one of your competitors. However, you can do a number of things that will help you improve your website speed, and even triple it in many cases. We’ll be looking at those things in this article, and you should be able to implement all of them within about eight hours give or take.
#1: A Quality Server and Host (Two Hours)
One of the first and most important things when it comes to your website’s speed has to be the host and server type you are using. If you want fast, you want to have a dedicated server rather than a shared server. Those who need to switch servers should not find it to be overly difficult to do, nor time consuming. You will be able to talk with the hosts at your new company, and they should be able to help you or walk you through the process of getting your site onto their server. From start to finish, this should take a novice no more than two hours to do, so long as they are working with a quality host.
#2: Enable Browser Caching (One Hour)
One of the other things that you should do with your server is to make use of browser caching if it is available. This will allow repeat visitors to have the site to load even faster for them. Enabling caching should not take long at all. With many hosts, it is simply a matter of clicking a button in the control panel. It may be more complex for some users though, so we’ll allocate an hour to this task. This allows you to research some of the benefits of browser caching before you make the change.
#3 Enable Compression (Two Hours)
If you have large pages, that are 100kb or greater, or you have a lot of photos on your pages, you might find that they are loading slowly. This can certainly affect the flow of your website. Many website owners are using a tool called Gzip to help them with the compression. It reduces the bandwidth of the pages and shrinks the HTTP response. Some who have used this tool find that it’s possible to lower the page download time by about 70%. Imagine how much faster your visitors will be able to enjoy the site. Setup of this tool can be a bit tricky for those who are not used to working with compression, so it could take up to two hours.
Optimize All Images (Three Hours)
How many pictures do you have on your website? If you have quite a few photos, then they could be causing your site to load slowly, especially if you have not yet taken the time to optimize them. Keep the photo size small – the size of the file, not the actual photo. Crop the photo if you need to, as this can cut out some additional size. Use JPEGs when uploading the photos. If you have a large number of photos, this can take some time to complete. We’ve estimated that it would take most users around three hours to go through and take care of all of their photos.