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

Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by in Internet

fastorfuriousEither 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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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18 Responses to “Fast or Furious – 7 Quick Tips to Speed up Your Site”

  1. Keith

    30. Mar, 2010

    Something else I do after resizing images is I host them elswhere like Flickr, this will also decrease bandwidth…

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  2. Scott@ Forex Robot

    30. Mar, 2010

    I’m def. going to give a try to sizing down the images on my homepage and install super chache since I’m using WordPress. Good thing I stumbled across this list.

    Reply to this comment

  3. Andrew@BloggingGuide

    30. Mar, 2010

    How fast a site can load is also considered in search engine rankings so it’s really important that your site loads fast. It’s not only for the readers but for the search engine rankings as well.

    Reply to this comment

  4. portable sauna

    30. Mar, 2010

    @Keith: in my opinion hosting it on your own site will be better.
    Thanks for the nice post.

    Reply to this comment

  5. Charles Savage-EL

    31. Mar, 2010

    Hi, this is some cool stuff,I will give it a try.

    Reply to this comment

  6. Credit Girl

    31. Mar, 2010

    Absolutely hate sites that take forever to load. People don’t have the time to wait so altering your page to speed up your site is very important for your users. I’ll have to consider some of these tips to speed up my own page! Thanks!

    Reply to this comment

  7. handmade holiday gift ideas

    01. Apr, 2010

    These days, with broadband connections the norm, we don’t need to worry as much about internet speeds or the filesize of our pages. However, that’s not to say that we still shouldn’t do so. If you wish to reduce the load times on your server, decrease the number of HTTP requests.

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  8. pays to live green

    01. Apr, 2010

    Making sure a site is fast is really important. If you leave a person waiting too long, they will often leave and not want to stick around to wait for a site, no matter how good it may be. I would also recommend using tools like yuicompressor to compress those js and css files to as small as possible and combine them into one.

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  9. charlie C

    01. Apr, 2010

    What “handmade” says is completely untrue. If that was the case, all sites would load equally fast. IF everyone had broadband, and IF everyone was at the same speed of broadband, all that would do is level the playing field. You can have a Ferrari, but you still have to stop at the stoplights, and if “handmade’s” stoplight is longer than others, it will hurt you. Some sites still load faster than others, and if you don’t take the steps like the ones in this post, yours will be one of the slow ones and get passed by by visitors.

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  10. used tires

    01. Apr, 2010

    @pays: I think that’s true if it’s a new customer, but even then, people are usually willing to bear it once atleast. But if it’s sluggish all the time, then it can really create a negative impression.

    Till then,

    Jean

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  11. Laptop Briefcases

    01. Apr, 2010

    I think with the faster internet speeds many site owners are forgetting about this crucial factor. Just because it loads fast on your broadband connection, it does not mean that it will load fast on a cell phone or the increasingly more rare dial up connection. As Andrew mentioned, search engines do factor in a site’s loading time. This is not something that you want to sacrifice just to have a pretty, flashy site.

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  12. Miguel

    01. Apr, 2010

    Thanks for sharing, this post reminded me of some things I knew I needed to fix for my site. For example, like reducing the image size of high quality photos.

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  13. Wall Decals

    02. Apr, 2010

    These are some great tips that I wish everyone knew about. I hate it when a page is slow to load. I am gone from that website before it is even up. I will have to check out our website and implement these tips.

    Reply to this comment

  14. Ballet Moves

    07. Apr, 2010

    These are some great tips, especially considering how small an attention span is of the average internet user. If you can’t catch their attention quickly, expect your potential customers and clients to bounce.

    Great tip on the image re-sizing though, I hadn’t thought about that.

    Reply to this comment

  15. Alex Aguilar

    16. Apr, 2010

    With Google considering site speed as a factor for rankings, it`s more and more important to improve our websites. I always try to make my blogs load under 4 seconds..so I hope I won`t have any problems

    Reply to this comment

  16. chalikovas

    20. Apr, 2010

    It is really value information for me. Because i have sites.. It is useful to all. Thanks for sharing

    Reply to this comment

  17. pandora jewelry

    22. Apr, 2010

    I think the caching plug-in is very important as it share lots of loads and make the website quicker and faster to load.

    Reply to this comment

  18. Game Critic

    23. Apr, 2010

    Use Yslow and test your website. It is the best tool ever for optimizing and load testing your site.

    Reply to this comment

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