How To Make My Web Site Run Faster

gostoo

New member
I want to optimize my website from a developer and designer point of view. I know that it will be faster if i upgrade hosting etc but i want to ask members of this forum if the can share some tips on how to make my website so that it run faster and loads quickly at the user end.

The optimizations advice i am seeking should be related to graphics of website and coding of a website.
 
Agree that you will need to upgrade hosting package to have better bandwidth but there are certain things you might wanna do as well to make your page lighter like your image file size to be smaller than ever. If this is a static webpages, then surely if would be faster but if you are using CMS like wordpress there is a plugin they call wordpress cache plugin which can definitely help loads the pages faster especially if this users keep coming back.
 
I usually just optimize all my images and make sure that none are too big for what I need them for. That, and I keep away from flash plugins, they make pages terribly slow and heavy. I now prefer to go with HTML5 whenever I need something like it.
 
Share the CSS and JavaScript between pages as much as possible so that it will be cached when the second and subsequent pages are accessed. Attach any JavaScript at the bottom of the page so that the page can be displayed while the JavaScript is still loading.
 
I have very little idea about coding. However I have played around with images and I have some ideas about how to make your site load faster as far as images are concerned. The first thing to do is to decide on the smallest size that's acceptable. Make it a thumbnail so that your visitor can see the full image when he wants to. Then keep your images to a minimum. The less images, the faster the loading speed.
 
ok here is some tips:
1. Add all styles to css..
2. Resize your images, make all of them .png if possible or just simply turn on photoshop and save the image for internet ( there is an option in photoshop)
3. If you use javascripts try to add library from different websites <hard to explain> there are websites where You can find libraries and there is high chance that user who come to Your website will already have specific library in his cookies.
4. In your code try to delete all marks that You dont need, also a spaces between lines should be deleted.
 
Just to sum the stuff up from above:

The speed of a website depends on a few things:

Server
Connection
Client
And on each of this part you can do improvements.

Server: if you rely on a database, check if you queries are cached, and more importantly check if your data is cached. For example if on every page you get a menu from the database, then you can cache that result. In addition you can check your code and see if there is room for optimization. Also the hardware itself plays a role. If you are on a shared hosting plan, maybe the server is full of other not-optimized apps that take a toll on the server.

Connection: Here the YSlow and Pagespeed come in handy, as well as Fiddler. You can do some caching of static content (CSS and JS). Set their expire date far in the future. Using GZIP to make their contents smaller, and combining the static files helps to a certain extent. In addition maybe the server has a low bandwidth.

Client: if you do wacky javascript or have slow css selectors, this might hurt performance on the client. But this depends on the speed of the client's computer.
 
- Replace graphical elements with CSS as much as possible. If you have a bunch of graphics being used for gradient backgrounds, rounded corners, shadows and such, these can all be done with CSS and the effects are pretty consistently supported in all major browsers these days.

- Also, for other graphical elements, if you are using PNG's or JPG's for things like icons or logos, consider swapping them out with SVG images or creating a custom icon font with Icomoon.

- If you are using graphics for fancier text in a unique non-web safe font, consider replacing those with actual HTML text styled with one of the many free Google Web Fonts instead.

- If your site is running on Wordpress, there are a number of caching plugins available, but I would say W3 Total Cache is perhaps the best of them. It's also the most difficult to configure though so check with your web host if they offer a config file for you.

- Consolidate your tracking tags, and remove the ones you no longer need. Too many tracking codes on your site can slow it down dramatically.
 
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