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Fast or Furious – 7 Quick Tips to Speed up Your Site

Either your website is fast, or your visitors are furious – or at the very least, annoyed! People have no patience for lagging, slow-loading sites. You know this. You’re probably the same way. If you find a site through searching Google or linking from another site and it takes too long to load, you’re on to the next result. That means all that company’s SEO efforts worked great, but their ultimate goal of getting you to land on their site – and more importantly, take action on their site – was missed. What a waste! Don’t let that happen to you. Take these quick, easy steps to make sure your site is as fast as possible.

Trim your images. When you display an image on your site, size it using image editing software first. The closer the original image is to the size you have it displaying on your site, the faster it will load. If you’re looking for an inexpensive alternative to Photoshop, check out Gimp. It’s free and will do pretty much anything you need.

Specify image dimensions. Even though you’re going to trim your images to actual size, go ahead and define image dimensions in your code by setting the height and width image tag attributes. That way, the browser knows what the page looks like without having to load the images first. Otherwise, it loads the images first, and then the rest of the page.

KISS. Keep your site as simple as is practical, while maintaining your brand image. For some companies, a minimalist site won’t make sense, but if you can find ways to trim down the window dressing and keep it clean and neat, it will be more appealing, and your pages will load faster.

Implement a caching plug-in. If you have a blog site, installing a caching plug-in can make a big difference in how fast your pages load. The plug-in works by caching pages, and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file, rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and building the page from the database. If you’re running WordPress, check out WP Super Cache.

Use a CDN. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) reduces server load and bandwidth – thus improving stability and availability – by transferring static content, (stylesheets, images, flash, javascripts, etc.). A great, free, peer-to-peer solution is The Coral Content Distribution Network. If you’re on WordPress there’s a plug-in that will interface your site with Coral for you, called Free CDN. If you’re not on WordPress, don’t sweat it. It’s easy to implement this solution yourself.

Combine your CSS. Combine your CSSs into a single CSS file. This reduces server requests, speeding up your visitor’s browsing. While you’re at it, clean up your CSS to eliminate any styles you’re not using. The bottom line is, the cleaner your code is, the quicker your site loads.

Move to a dedicated server. Depending on your traffic and content, this might not be necessary for a while, but as your site grows, you’ll eventually want to make the switch. For a quick, free test of your site’s load speed, check out Vertain Software’s tool. If you want a more comprehensive report of your site’s performance and elements, take a look at WebSiteOptimization.com.

These steps should ensure your site is built for speed and keeping your visitors happy and coming back. What other tips do you have for making sure your site doesn’t lag? Share in the comments below!

Matthew Toren
 

Matthew Toren is a serial entrepreneur, mentor, investor and co-founder of YoungEntrepreneur.com. He is co-author, with his brother Adam, of Kidpreneurs.org, BizWarriors.com and Small Business, BIG Vision: Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right (Wiley).

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