Six Simple Ways to Speed Up Your Website
A website's loading speed has always been important when it came those you visit. Nobody likes a slow website, which always increases a website's bounce rate. Recently Google has changed the game a bit, buy making a faster website load time a part of their ranking algorithm. In other words, the faster your website, the better it fairs in Google's search results. There are many other factors that rank website's well in Google, all equally important, but I will focus on the aspect of page speed Here are six simple ways to dramatically speed up your website, making both your visitors and Google happy.
1. Minimize HTML
Use CSS to arrange web page elements as apposed to tables. Tables were meant for one purpose in HTML, tabular data. Using tables to arrange page element adds "bloat" to web pages creating larger file sizes. Remove carriage returns, unnecessary "white spaces", and comment tags from your HTML with an HTML shrinker. Having all of your HTML code on a single line will reduce file size greatly.
2. Reduce Image Sizes
Utilize the various "online image crunchers" available on the web to reduce image sizes without losing the images original luster. Also remove any unneeded images from your web pages with help reduce file size and load time.
3. Combine External JavaScript and CSS
Add all of your JS scripts into one JS file, as well as all of your CSS into one CSS file and call them externally in the head of the web pages.
4. Minimize JS and CSS
There are many online JS and CSS compressors that will reduce these file sizes considerably.
5. Enable Gzip Compression
Enable Gzip compression on your server for static and dynamic content. This will reduce page sizes by up to 2/3.
6. Minimize DNS Lookups
Avoid loading content such as images and scripts from external websites. Every IP or DNS lookup takes time. Try to keep everything on your own server.
After following these steps, you will see an immediate an difference in your website's speed. Use our website speed test and see the results. Your website visitors will stay longer and Google will be pleased. You may even see some improvements in your search positions within a week or two.