Speed is important to Google search engine rankings and visitor experience. In this podcast I talked about four ways to speed up your website:
- Hosting type matters.
- WordPress caching creates fully assembled pages in advance so the visitor doesn’t have to wait.
- Image optimization makes images smaller by striping unnecessary data and size but retaining the quality of the image.
- CDN (content delivery network) disperses copies of your website’s files to the closest server near the visitor.
Other ways not covered:
- Minify web files (HTML, JS, CSS) – this means to strip out white-space and comments.
- Use image sprites for similar multiple images.
- Proper use of image output: know when to use a .gif, .jpeg, .svg, .png.
- Combine javascript files and move non crucial files to the footer.
- Enable browser caching which tells the browser to use local files already downloaded.
- Gzip tells the server to compress website files and send them (like a zip file) to the visitor.
Mentioned links
WordPress caching plugins:
- WP Super Cache
- W3 Total Cache
- Comet Cache (recommended for simplicity)
Content delivery networks (CDN):
Image optimizers:
- JpegMini (on and offline solution)
- WP Smush (plugin)
- EWWW Image Optimizer (plugin)
Adobe Photoshop also can optimize images for the web and DPI stands for (dots per inch). Be careful using plugins that optimize the images you upload to WordPress as they can be resource intensive especially if you’re on shared hosting.
Article: How to speed up WordPress and pass the Google Page Speed Test This article mentions how to do most of this stuff on your own or with the help of your developer.
Also, if you’d like us to perform these optimizations, contact us.