10 things you can do to speed up your site
1. Minimize HTTP Requests:
Start a campaign to reduce the number of components on each page. By doing this, you reduce the number of HTTP requests needed to make the page render—and you’ll significantly improve site performance buy backlinks.
2. Reduce server response time:
Your target is a server response time of less than 200ms (milliseconds). And if you follow the tips in this article, you’re well on your way to achieving this.
3. Enable compression:
Large pages (which is what you could have if you’re creating high-quality content are often 100kb and more. As a result, they’re bulky and slow to download. The best way to speed their load time is to zip them—a technique called compression.
Compression reduces the bandwidth of your pages, thereby reducing HTTP response. You do this with a tool called Gzip.
Most web servers can compress files in Gzip format before sending them for download, either by calling a third-party module or using built-in routines.
And since 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that support Gzip, it’s a great option for speeding up your site.
4. Enable browser caching:
When you visit a website, the elements on the page you visit are stored on your hard drive in a cache, or temporary storage, so the next time you visit the site, your browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server.
Static resources should have a cache lifetime of at least a week. For third-party resources like ads or widgets, they should have a cache lifetime of at least one day.
For all cacheable resources (JS and CSS files, image files, media files, PDFs, etc.), set Expires to a minimum of one week, and preferably up to one year in the future. Don’t set it to more than one year in the future because that violates the RFC guidelines.
5. Minify Resources:
Since every unnecessary piece of code adds to the size of your page, it’s important that you eliminate extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation in your code so your pages are as lean as possible.
6. Optimize images:
Take time to re-size your images before uploading them. And always include the src attribute with a valid URL.
To ensure your images load quickly, consider adding the EWWW Plugin to your website.
7. Optimize CSS Delivery:
When setting up your styles, only use one external CSS stylesheet since additional stylesheets increase HTTP requests. Here are a two resources that can help:
- CSS Delivery Tool – Tells you how many external stylesheets your website is using.
- Instructions for combining external CSS files
Avoid including CSS in HTML code, such as divs or your headings (like the inline CSS pictured above). You get cleaner coding if you put all CSS in your external stylesheet.
8. Prioritize above-the-fold content:
Consider splitting your CSS into two parts: a short inline part that styles above-the-fold elements, and an external part that can be deferred.
9. Reduce the number of plugins you use on your site:
Deactivate and delete any unnecessary plugins. Then weed out any plugins that slow your site speed.
10. Reduce redirects:
Google recommends these two actions to make sure a responsive redirect doesn’t slow your site:
- Use a HTTP redirect to send users with mobile user agents directly to the mobile equivalent URL without any intermediate redirects, and
- Include the <link rel=”alternate”> markup in your desktop pages to identify the mobile equivalent URL so Googlebot can discover your mobile pages.
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