Speeding Up Your Website
Slow loading pages not only make it difficult for visitors to access your site, some may simply leave it altogether. Google considers page load speed an important search rank factor. These download times can be affected by the size of the HTML file itself or the number of requests it took to download all the referenced media.
Having large amounts of references to images, javascripts and media files also play a large roll in how fast your website loads. Each one of these file references requires the browser to connect to your server to a retrieve the referenced content. The more references you have, the longer it will take for the page to fully load. It is however important to note that the more requests you have, does impact visitors with slower connections or using mobile devices.
Tips for Speeding Things Up
- Making sure HTML and CSS are upto date and error free
- Cleaning up any UNUSED CSS
- Removing any uneeded commented out HTML
- Compress all JavaScripts
- Compress all CSS files
- Compress your HTML
- Compress all your images
- Limit the amount of <object> and <embed> tags if you are loading media files
- Remove any background sounds
- Take advantage of CDNs (Content delivery networks). Ask your hosting provider if they support it
- Enable Browser Caching
- Enable Gzip Compression
- Place your CSS files at the top of the page and JavaScript files at the bottom of the page
- Specify a character set
- Externalise CSS and Javascript (no inline)
- Limit Redirects Where Possible
- Learn about Dynamic Sites
Resources:
Here are some great tools to help you accomplish some of the recommendations above.
