Website speed matters! With today’s fast paced life who has time waiting for webpages to load on every interaction.
Luckily, there’s some easy techniques you can implement to ensure your website is performing at its best.
Areas of discussion:
- Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
- Image compression.
- Images uploaded to their display dimensions.
- Review the plugins you are using.
- Reducing redirects.
Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
This is one for developers! Developers need to regularly review the code on the website and remove irrelevant lines of code; removing any unnecessary characters.
Image compression
Website speeds work hand in hand with the browsers ability to display images on a website. The larger the image size the more it impacts website speed. Here’s a couple of things to consider.
- Ensure all images are no more than 200KB.
- Try to avoid .PNGs.
- Use an image editing tool like Photoshop to compress images.
- Use an image compression app.
Images uploaded to their display dimensions
Images are an integral part of the site. It is a part of brand for some companies to display large lifestyle images on the website. All these can come at a cost if you don’t consider the following to ensure good website speed.
- Although most platforms resize images uploaded to the server to the size set in the website code. It is best practice to upload images to the server that I sized to the display size.
Review the plugins you are using
Website and online stores have come a long way where functionality needed on site can be a click away by installing a plugin. Here are some items to consider that may impact website speed when using plugin.
- Regularly review plugins and remove any that are not in use.
- Consider doing website speed checks on every install of a plugin to understand the performance impacts.
- Keep plugins up to date.
- Do you need a plugin or can the functionality easily be achieved with code?
Reducing redirects
When migrating a site or online shop from one platform to another. Redirects may be put in place to redirect important content.
Other items to consider
Google search algorithms use mobile first indexing best practices to rank websites. This means that the algorithms favours websites that perform well on mobile. This means that when websites are developed, they should be done so with the website speed on mobile at the forefront.
How does your site stack up? You can use the website speed test tool, curtesy of Pingdom, to test your website.