How to make your website faster

How to make your website faster

Both website visitors and search engines alike prefer web pages that load quickly. Akin Fagbohun, researcher and content writer on behalf of managed data services company Six Degrees Group, explains how to squeeze more pace out of your site.

Compress your website files

In the same way that you can zip files to reduce their size on your computer, you can also compress the files that form the structure and content of your web pages.

Most recent web browsers can open compressed files, and using compression means your site’s pages will be transferred more quickly. You can compress your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files for faster load times.

The process of compressing and uploading your files can be a little technical, so you may want to ask your web designer or agency about this.

Use browser caching

Browser caching is an excellent way to reduce load times for returning visitors. Caching tells a returning visitor’s web browser if anything on the site has changed since they last visited.

If the site is the same, the web browser will simply show the pages it downloaded last time, instead of downloading the information again. And if only certain files have changed, it’ll only download those.

Most web hosting companies already support caching. If yours does, it should be enabled automatically, so you won’t have to do anything to benefit.

Implement image management

If you want your site to be super-quick, think about how the images you’re uploading will be displayed. To minimise load times, make sure images you upload have already been scaled to the size at which they’ll be displayed.

If the same image is used in different places at different sizes, scale the image down to the maximum size it will appear then reduce the size in your website’s HTML code where necessary.

Most content management systems like WordPress will do this for you.

Use a content delivery network (CDN)

The term ‘CDN’ has become a bit of a buzzword in the world of web hosting lately. When you use a CDN service, your website is replicated to a number of servers around the world.

When a visitor calls up your site, the server closest to them delivers your site. This reduces the stress placed on any single web server, and means the data has a shorter distance to travel to its destination.

Again, some web hosting firms provide access to a CDN as part of their hosting package. 

• Why the website X Factor effect is killing small businesses
• Three free services to monitor for website problems
• The fundamentals of search engine optimisation