How to Speed Up & Optimize Your Website The Best Way You Can

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First thing that any website owner has to keep in mind is SPEED. Optimizing your site so that it loads in less than 5 seconds should be the main goal. Ever notice some websites that you land on but take forever to load and you hit the back but faster than the website loads! Well, thats not good. Your chances of having lost that customer are pretty high.

Most companies spend so much time and resources designing a top-notch website but fail to address one simple thing – page load. There is no point of having a great and useful website if it loads super-slow and people cant get to it. The average time a person spends on a page is about 8 seconds and if the site takes more than 10 seconds too load, that person is gone in no time without even waiting for it to load.

So what causes the webpage to load so slow ?

There are a few factors and it really depends on the websites structure bu the most common are:

  • Too many images that are not saved for the web (e.g banner.jpg 890 KB) 
  • Heavy usage of JavaScript 
  • Bad choice of web application platform ( e.g CMS, Shopping Cart, etc)
  • Server performance ( shared hosting, not enough RAM)
  • Poor coding structure that does not flow correctly

This is just the top of the surface and there are too many other aspects of website optimization and we cant list them all here.

Below are some quick tips for website optimization for and improve page loading times :

  1. Compress all of your scripts including all CSS, Javascripts files and externally reference them.
  2. Create a cookie-less subdomain and host all of your images there so you are not appending unnecessary cookies to the images. (Do the same for css and js files)
  3. Get a VPS server or Dedicated server with at least 712MB in RAM
  4. Separate your database from your local web server to a different server but make sure there is not latency. ( this one is complicated)
  5. Disable Apache modules that you don’t need as Apache is memory hungry and will take up RAM
  6. If using php add application accelerators such as xcache, eaccelerator, zend

Optimizing your website for faster page load is an ongoing process that requires a lot of work but that its worth it at the end because FASTER website equals more customers which leads to more revenue.

If you can’t do this on your own and are looking to hire a developer to do instead, please email me at don@tripleroi.com to discuss the details.