Introduction
In this article, we’ll try to answer the question “How do I make my website fast?”. We’ll also show you how to check the performance of your website, and explain some common ways of improving it. You can use these tips for any type of site, from blogs to e-commerce stores – they all benefit from being faster!
Is your website fast?
There are some easy ways to measure the speed of your site. The first thing you can do is head over to Pingdom, which will scan your site and give you a performance grade. This tool is great because it also gives you suggestions on what you can do to improve page load speed. You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, which provides an overall score measuring how well a site performs across all devices and browsers.
How fast is your website?
If you want to know how fast your website is, there are a few free tools that can show you. Here’s what they do:
Pingdom Website Speed Test – This tool measures the load time of your home page and some other pages on your site. It also calculates the average load time of all indexed pages in your domain (including images, CSS and JavaScript files). The final score is calculated based on these two measurements, with a maximum score of 100 points possible. Use this tool to see how quickly people from around the world will be able to access your site!
Google PageSpeed Insights – This tool provides suggestions for improving the performance of web pages by analyzing their content for best practices in HTML code organization, network latency reduction through caching technologies like GZIP Compression & Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), optimizing images with WebPagetest’s Image Optimizer API or MozJPEGJS libraries , reducing redirects , measuring total page size using WebPageTest API filters , etc…
How fast is your website?
To measure how fast your website loads, you can use the Pingdom Website Speed Test. It’s free, easy to use and provides insights on how to make your site faster.
If you’re a Google Chrome user, you might also want to check out their PageSpeed Insights tool for in-depth analysis of page speed, mobile friendliness and more.
Another option is GTMetrix: it’s not as popular as Pingdom or Google Page Speed Insights but offers a thorough analysis of web performance with suggestions for improvement. You’ll need an account before using this service (you’ll get 10 days free).
Webpagetest is another good alternative if you want a more detailed report on the speed of individual resources within your site (images and scripts). This tool also measures mobile performance so it’s good for checking whether or not the experience is compromised on mobile devices compared with desktop computers.
Compress your JavaScript files.
You can also compress your JavaScript files. If you need some help with this, there are tools like UglifyJS which will minify and compress your code. You can also perform this on CSS files by using a tool such as YUI Compressor or CSS Minifier to do the same thing.
Use server-side caching.
A good way to speed up your website is by using server-side caching. This method of caching takes data that’s stored on the server, and stores it there instead of in the user’s browser. The result is a faster site, since the cache can be accessed without having to go back to your database or CDN each time.
There are two types of server-side caching: static and dynamic. Static servers store static assets like HTML pages, CSS documents and JavaScript files in their own cache space so they don’t have to be downloaded each time a page loads; this means that not only do you save bandwidth but also reduce load on your servers. Dynamic caches use data from databases like MySQL or MongoDB; when someone visits a page where information is being displayed (for example an article list), instead of going back through all those records again just for one visitor, it will pull from its own local copy – which means reduced load on the database too!
Compress your images.
It’s no secret that images make up a huge part of the web. The average website weighs in at around 2MB and has over 100 individual images, so it’s important to keep them as small as possible to ensure your site loads fast.
To compress your images, use a tool like TinyPNG (or other similar services). You can also reduce the quality of an image before uploading it to save space – but be careful not to lose too much detail! It’s best not to go below 80% compression if possible.
If you have an image hosting service like Flickr or Instagram which automatically adds metadata about each photo when it is uploaded, you might want to remove this before uploading because sometimes this can increase file size by up to 30%.
Consider using a CDN.
A content delivery network, or CDN, is a network of servers that serve content to users. A CDN is used to speed up the delivery of static assets like images and JavaScript files. When someone visits your site, they download content from their browser cache or from one of the servers that you host in your data center. If you use a CDN for these resources, then users’ browsers will fetch them directly from the nearest available server instead of having to make a trip back to your data center first.
Fast websites help users and search engines.
You’ve probably heard that speed is an important factor in how users perceive a website, and you may have already taken steps to make your site fast. But did you know that search engines prefer fast websites and will pass them up for slower ones?
It’s true! The faster your website loads, the more likely it is that users will stick around and search engines will find it. This means faster sites are more likely to be indexed by search engines like Google and Bing. It also means that people who visit your site are less likely to bounce from the page—meaning they’re more likely to read what you wrote and go away with something interesting in mind, which means more traffic for you down the line (and again: indexing). And all of this should mean better rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Conclusion
The end result: a faster website. It’s as simple as that! But we hope that by going through these steps, you’ve come away with an understanding of what makes websites slow and how to fix them. And if you have any questions about any of the techniques mentioned above or want more assistance in optimizing your site, don’t hesitate to reach out—we’d love to help.
