How to Speed Up Website Performance and Load Time

Increasing Your Website Speed

Ever wonder what makes a website so fast? Here is a look at the mechanics your site speed and how to increase your own websites load time.

6 Metrics Used to Determine Speed
1. Redirection Time
2. Domain Lookup Time
3. Server Connection Time
4. Server Response Time
5. Page Download Time
6. Browser Time

6 Objects Used to Determine Speed
1. Content
2. Server
3. Cookies
4. CSS Files
5. JavaScript Files
6. Mobile Version of the Website

Top 5 Tools for Increasing Website Speed

Here is a listing of the top five tools you can use to help increase your website speed.

1. GTmetrix – This free tool uses Google PageSpeed and Yahoo! YSlow tools to offer results and recommendations in a user-friendly way.

2. Google – Google offers free Webmaster Tools for basic monitoring of broken links, server connectivity, and DNS server connectivity issues to assist the webmaster with quickly evaluating possible metrics responsible for slowing down site speed.

3. Monitis – This free tool checks the website uptime status and page load time from the USA, Europe, and Asia/Pacific locations.

4. Pingdom – This is a paid service the checks DNS health and page load time from the USA and Europe.

5. Blitz – A paid service for heavy load testing. It checks how your website responses to high traffic.

10 Best Practices to Follow

There are multiple options that exist in helping the webmaster from having to change anything. Here are 10 best practices to follow.

1. Use a site such as WordPress or Joomla that offers paid or free design themes and plugins. These will automatically make relevant recommendations for HTML/CSS/Javascript code.

2. Minimize round trip times by reducing the number of serial request response cycles. The fewer requests made, the quicker the speed. Combine components such as external Javascript and external CSS. Try to keep DNS and redirects to a minimal while avoiding bad requests made by broken links.

3. Minimize request overhead and payload size by removing unused code. Enable GZIP compression to reduce the number of bytes sent over the network and serve static content from a cookieless domain by disabling the use of cookies. Optimize images with use of TinyPNG or JPEGmini to massively reduce file size up to 80% without impacting quality. Serve scaled images and do not scale down images by using attributes for width or height, provide small ones.

4. Implement proper caching by leveraging browser and proxy caching.

5. Clean up source code by removing HTML comments and make the HTML code as small as possible. Move out inline CSS and Javascript to external files making it cacheable. Don’t use empty href src attributes.

6. Consider using asynchronous requests by offloading components into AJAX fragments when it doesn’t harm SEO and use HeadJS by loading a single Javascript file into the. Asynchronous video and AJAX impacts page load speed very little. Parallelize downloads across hostnames and streaming large video files from the same server hinders your goals.

7. Optimize hosting and web servers by preventing overloading and properly configuring the server. If performance issues exist, let the hosting provider know.

8. Optimize your PHP setup by using memcached sessions only and use a PHP accelerator such as PHP-FPM.

9. Use a content delivery network to reduce server load and page load time. By placing static files close to the visitors, you can speed up load times from varying by different countries. Save money be using Google’s content delivery network for popular libraries.

10. Optimize for mobile use. Defer parsing of Javascript that only adds additional time to page load. Make landing page redirects cachable.

7 Basic Recommendations

Here is a look at 7 basic recommendations to follow.

1. Upgrade to the latest version of your CMS and plugins. Keeping versions updated can normally help make performance improvements.

2. Get rid of unnecessary plugins. This will help to improve your page load time.

3. Switch to more efficient plugins. WordPress plugins such as Plugin Performance Profiler creates a profile for your plugin’s performance by measuring their impact on your sites load time.

4. Optimize images. Use a CMS plugin or convert to TinyPNG and JPEGmini sites.

5. Use cache and minification plugin. Example plugins to use are W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache with WP Minify for WordPress.

6. Use a CDN. The content delivery network is a collection of servers that exist in different places in the world and allows for increasing the time for loading content.

7. Consider switching to a better DNS and hosting provider. You can test your hosting performance with free tools like Pingdom Tools and Monitis Free Tools.