Jan 04 2011

10 Tips to Speed Up Your Website

If your site is slow, people will leave. Hopefully, you already know that. What you may not know is that Google also uses site speed as a ranking factor. Bottom line- the faster you can make your site, the better. Here are 10 tips (and free tools) to speed up your site.

  1. Optimize Your Images. Use this software to reduce the size of your images.
  2. More Is Less. Remove elements you don’t really need.
  3. Don’t Use Images to Display Text. With CSS styles you can make text look pretty much any way you want.
  4. Use External CSS and Script Files. Don’t include CSS or JavaScript code in your HTML documents. Create separate files and call out to them when necessary.
  5. Use DIVs for Layout. Avoid using tables.
  6. Use Clean Code. Get rid of unnecessary code. Many free tools like CleanCSS can make optimization easier. Just be sure to ALWAYS backup your files before trying to optimize any code.
  7. Use Trailing Slashes When Linking to Directories. If you have your blog in a folder called “blog”, link to www.yoursite.com/blog/ (with a trailing slash at the end) as opposed to www.yoursite.com/blog.
  8. Use the Height and Width Tags. Don’t forget to use these tags for images and other elements.
  9. Avoid the Excessive Use of Flash. Flash animations can really slow your website down; avoid them if possible.
  10. Speed Up Your WordPress Site. If you have a WordPress site, use the WP Super Cache plugin.

Zeke Camusio is a serial entrepreneur, Internet marketing expert, published author, speaker and founder of an Internet Marketing Agency in Portland, OR

18 Responses to “10 Tips to Speed Up Your Website”

  1. Tristina says:
    January 5, 2011 at 6:20 am

    This are the best tips to achieve in SE. we must always think from Visitors and search engines side to update the site.. always we must make our website seo friendly.

    The XS Group Reply:
    January 5th, 2011 at 11:08 am

    Tristna,

    But surely this is the first step in making you site SEO friendly?

    The XS Group

  2. Suraj @SmartFatBlogger says:
    January 6, 2011 at 8:10 am

    Yeah, I totally agree with you. Thanks for sharing this post.

  3. Shazan Sayani says:
    January 6, 2011 at 12:52 pm

    these are really awesome tips which people usually don’t know.. they initially install Google Webmaster tools in their site but while watching a graph of site performance they only disappoint becuase they usually don’t know how to optimize and speed up their sites..

  4. Ryan says:
    January 7, 2011 at 8:53 pm

    I can’t stand when people use flash and it takes forever to load… or when they even make an intro page that you have to watch before even finding the site… what’s the point?

  5. sarbartha says:
    January 9, 2011 at 2:06 pm

    Nice short tips..

  6. Kranthi @ EchoBlogger says:
    January 9, 2011 at 4:36 pm

    All the 10 tips are very much useful in loading website faster…but what is the theme customization’s factor in this case?

  7. Nick Stamoulis says:
    January 10, 2011 at 12:35 pm

    These are all great tips, optimizing images is an important factor not in just speed of site, but in SEO in general. Having optimized images will perhaps help your images show up in google images for those certain keywords. Also the excessive use of flash is never a good thing, so minimize for faster site speed and it is also a positive for your SEO efforts.

  8. Linda@enterdel says:
    January 16, 2011 at 12:00 pm

    I use W3 Total Cache plugin and jQuery plugin lazy load

  9. kC says:
    January 17, 2011 at 11:49 pm

    Why do you think we should Use Trailing Slashes When Linking to Directories ?

  10. eGrove systems says:
    January 20, 2011 at 12:36 pm

    this is really a useful ten tips for the quality SEO process.

    thanks for your interest to let us know about these tips.

  11. Nina @ Portland 4G Wireless says:
    January 21, 2011 at 8:27 pm

    Hi, just doing some research for my Portland 4g website. Truly more information that you can imagine on the web. Wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but interesting page. Have a nice day.

  12. Duncan McDougall says:
    January 30, 2011 at 5:13 pm

    Great advise but as a performance expert I believe you have missed of three tips which make major impact in page speed.

    Enabling browser caching of components means when a visitor hits a scripts, css or image they have already downloaded on a previous page they will not need to make a server request to check whether it’s the latest version. You set the expiry time when you feel will be safe to avoid this check, say a few days to a week. This is the main reason to make your CSS and JavaScript external – so they can be cached as HTML is not cached.

    Reducing the number of files loaded is also a big one since each file requires it’s own server request which adds latency to page load time. Combining CSS and JavaScript are the first place to work on. This page loads 7 theme stylesheets. Combing them into one can seriously help load time.

    For WordPress blogs remember to remove unused plugins. If you no longer display some component remove this plugin to avoid loading the heavy JavaScript that would have been required.

    Duncan

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    July 18, 2011 at 7:46 am

    Im not sure if I missed it but how do we test your blog software?

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  17. Luxury Broker Las Vegas says:
    November 25, 2011 at 7:34 pm

    Sites that take a lot of time to load can really be annoying especially if you are in a hurry to get information. Most sites that have this problems are usually filled with so many pictures and plugins which of course contribute in a major way to them taking so much time to load.