How to increase your website speed for Startups?
Are you a startup owner? Are you looking to increase your website speed but don’t know much or anything about coding? Then look no further.
Before we get started, you might want to test your websites speed. Here are some of the best website Speed Test Tools out there:
1. GTMetrics
Among some of the best website speed test tools of 2019 is GTmetrix. The platform is very straight forward and easy to use, once you have typed in your URL, simply press “Test Your Site” and then follow the simple instructions provided.
2. WebPageTest
WebTestPage, might not look like the most professional, most beautiful webpage out there, however it is a very relaible and effect method of testing your webpage and increasing your website speed.
Top 7 tips on how to increase your website speed – with little to no ‘Coding’ Knowledge
Once you have tested your website on one of the previous tools, it is time to speed up your site. The following is a list of things that you should do (as a must) in order to make your website faster, more user friendly and therefore have better SEO.
To Do List:
- Serve Scaled Images
- Avoid Landing Page Redirects
- Levarage Browser Chaching
- Defer Parsing of Javascript
- Optimise Images
- Minify CSS
- Specify Image Dimension
1. Serve Scaled Images
Serving appropriately-sized images can save many bytes of data and increase your website speed, especially on low-powered (eg. mobile) devices.
There might be and are most ofter situations where you have to use the same image in diffrent or various sizes, so the best thing to do is to upload a single image resource and let the HTML or CSS in the website or page to scale it the new size needed. Hoewver, this makes sense if actual size of the image matches the last one. However, if you were to upload an image that is larger than all of the markup instances, then you will be sending unnecessary bytes over the wire. Therefore, you should use an image editor and scale the image appropriately.
However, if you are someone that likes using plugins to do all the work for you (nothing wrong in that – it saves a lot of time) you can also use somthing like Regerate Thumbnail – A WordPress plugin.
2. Avoid Landing Page Redirects.
Landing page redirects can sometimes make the page slower, adding delays while the redirects are taking place, meaning that nothing is shown to a client.
A lot of the times redirections can be eliminated without changing the function of a page.
If your service requires redirects, perform the redirection server-side rather than client side, in order to reduce client-side round trip requests.
But don’t worry, there is also Plugins for this too. I’m guessing by now you are starting to realise that there are pluggins for pretty much everything.
3. Leverage Browser Chaching.
Leveraging browser chaching simply put means that you can specify or control how long web browsers can keep images, CSS and JS stored locally. As you probably already know, everytime someone accesses a website information, files and images are downloaded. This makes the website launch slower if it has to do it everytime. However, by levaraging browser chaching you can control how long the browser keeps this, meaning that it doesn’t have to download it.
WARNING! In order to leverage browser chaching you will have to have simple coding skills (Very simple)!
To enable browser chaching, add those lines to your .htaccess file:
The .htaccess file can be accessed by the File Manager on WordPress. (Again there is a plugin for this.) – File Manager
4. Defer Parsing of Javascript.
So what does this mean? –
If you defer parsing of JavaScript that means JavaScript(s) should load, only after the content of the website has loaded.
There are several ways to defer parsing of Javascript, up until recently they mainly consisted of knowing how to code, but as I mentioned earlier, there is a plugin for nearly everything out there. The best plugins in my opion to defer parsing of javascript are:
1. Autoptimize
5. Optimise Images
This is probably the simplest of setp in order to increase your website speed. The best way to optimise images for your website is to simply uplaod images at the right size and the right scale. If your images on your website are taking too long to load or are not loading imidiatly then simply:
- Reduce file sizes based on where images will be displayed
- Resize image files themeselves instead of via CSS
- Save files in appropriate format depending on usage.
Here is more information on how to perfectly prepare your images.
6. Minify CSS
The idea of minifying is to combine JS, HTML and CSS files so that they can be compressed and served to visitors, which as mentioned before will speed up loading times. However, ….
CAUTION!!
It’s worth noting that you should be very careful when setting up these types of plugins, they have sometimes been know to cause issues and conflicts with certain themes and plugins.
The best plugin to use in this case, as it does reduce the amount of errors is WP Super Minify
7. Specify Image dimensions.
Similarly to uploading the right image size, being able to specify the exact image size allows for faster rendering by eliminating the need for unnecessary reflows and repaints. This can all be done in your image editor on wordpress.
So know that you have made all these changes to your website you should be able to test them with one of the test tools (top of page) and see the increase in results. We did the same thing with our latest project www.Henleyspanishcentre.com and saw really positive results.
Looking for a superfast website yourself? Simply go check out our marketing packages or get in touch.
Tried to make these changes but still struggling? Want a faster website? Then don’t hesitate to get in touch.