9 Ways To Make Your Website is as Fast as Possible! | Storm Internet

In a previous article we’ve talked about how speed affects your website in terms of visitors abandoning the website and Google rankings.

To quickly re-cap a slow loading website will have a negative effect on:

• Traffic and page views
• Conversion
• Sales
• Your business’ perception
• How technologically savvy your visitors think you are

In fact even a delay of 0.5 seconds is enough for visitors to start leaving!

So how can you speed up your website?

Here’s the 9 best ways we’ve found to speed up your website. With these easy solutions you’ll be able to make sure that your website loads in 2 seconds or less as research has shown that 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

9 Ways To Make Your Website is as Fast as Possible!

• Remove add-ons and plugins
• Remove social sharing buttons
• Enable Expires Headers
• Change your theme
• Install pagespeed
• Optimize Your Database
• Use a PHP accelerator
• Load analytics and ad networks asynchronously
• Get Better Web Hosting

Let’s break these down a little further…

• Remove Add-ons and Plugins.
  Plugins and add-ons can reduce the speed of your website significantly. This is especially important if you used a Content Management System or (CMS) such as WordPress.In an experiment by Startbloggingonline.com, the homepage loading speed was reduced from 4.23 to 1.33 seconds without changing hosting, or making any other large changes other than removing the plugins and add-ons on the blog.Remember that when it comes to plugins and add-ons it’s quality not quantity. You can run as many plugins as possible as long as they are quality and avoid a lot of scripts and styles or ones that require a lot of remote requests. If you’re not sure, err on the side of caution and remove any excess plugins or add-ons.
• Remove Social Sharing Buttons
  Social sharing buttons have become extremely popular lately but there’s no research that proves they contribute any sort of boost to your website’s traffic. However there is plenty of research that shows that social websites do slow your website down because they use JavaScript. In fact there have been reported cases of social media site outages that have impacted the website speed of people who had embedded their share buttons on their websites.Since there’s no reason to risk a slowdown we recommend removing the social sharing buttons entirely.
• Enable Expires Headers
  One of the most common reasons your website slows down is server response time. The more requests your visitors make to your servers the slower the website will load for them.Expires Headers directs your visitors to a cached version of the site. If you configure Expires Headers to only request a file once a month and the file is cached, then their browser will not make a request until a full month is over. This limits the number of HTTP request and also cuts down on repeated requests making your server work twice as fast!
• Change Your Website Theme
  Website themes can have a huge impact on your website speed. In a case study on Copyblogger they found that they could make a website 72% faster simply by changing the theme in WordPress and nothing else.
• Install Google Pagespeed
  PageSpeed is an open source server module from Google that will significantly speed up your website. It speeds up your site by automatically optimizing things according to Google’s own best performance practices. This is the easiest change you can make in this entire list and will make a big difference even if you do nothing else!If you host your own servers you can install Google Pagespeed yourself, if you outsource your servers ask your web hosts to install it for you.
• Optimize Your Database
  This is an easy but overlooked way to speed up your website, especially if you use a CMS that relies on a lot of database usage.Certain CMSs, ask your database to save data which fills up space in your database making your website eventually slow down. The worst offenders are plugins, which save logs or user data and blog CMSs like WordPress, which allow post revisions and pingbacks.Regularly cleaning out your database will make your website run faster and it can be automated with certain tools available online. If you outsource your hosting or web development be sure to ask them how often they clean out the database.
• Use a PHP Accelerator
  PHP is a very helpful website tool, as it keeps visitors from having to re-enter the same information into the website, but it can also slow down your website’s loading time.There are two options with PHP, either you can replace the PHP files with static HTML files or you can use a PHP accelerator such as eAccelerator to make your website much faster, if your website uses a lot of PHP and you can’t remove it.
• Load analytics and ad networks asynchronously
  Website analytics and ad network codes can contribute to your website slowing down significantly. This is even more prevalent when the remote server is slow or goes down.An easy solution to the slowdowns caused by analytics and ad network code is configuring your tracking codes to use asynchronous delivery. If you use asynchronous delivery even if an outage or delay occurs on the side of the ad network or analytics provider, your website will stay fast!
• Get Better Web Hosting
  If you’ve already tried everything on this list (or even the majority) and your website still isn’t loading faster, or you’re only noticing a tiny barely perceptible increase in speed, it might be time to consider new web hosting.

Studies have shown that the difference between a reliable dedicated server and cheap online hosting can be hundreds of milliseconds, which no easy tweak or hack can fix!

In this article we looked at what slows your website down and 9 different ways that you can speed up your website.

You know that a slow website costs you visitors and sales, so make sure you use each every one of these 9 ways to make your website as fast as possible. If you’d like super-fast hosting for your web site, talk to us at Storm by clicking here or calling us on 0800 817 4727. We’ve been providing ultra fast, secure web hosting services since 2004 and know a thing or two about optimising servers and sites for speed.