One of the most important elements of a website is the page load speed. The faster your site loads, the better user experience you are giving your website visitors. That is one of the reasons why fast load speed has always been an important part of search engine’s algorithms. PLUS, the cleaner your code is, the easier it is going to be for search engine’s to find the actual content on your website! Through our research, we have found a handful of useful tips and tricks to optimize your site’s load speed and we wanted to share them with you. Here are some of our favorites. If you have any great load speed tips or resources, please share with us by posting a comment!
GENERAL TIPS:
- Alphabetize attributes within an href. For example, <a href= “alt’, height=” “, src=” “, target=” “, width=” “>
- Minify HTML whenever possible. (Minify simply means to remove any unnecessary space, characters, etc… from the code)
IMAGES:
- Optimize all images! One of our programmers mentioned using Adobe Fireworks in lieu of Adobe Photoshop. He has seen it could make a big difference since Fireworks was specifically built for the web.
- Run images through a compressor to losslessly compress file sizes (sometimes jpgs or pngs have extra space even after optimizing. Losslessly compressing these will get rid of that extra space without compromising the quality of the photo. For Mac, try ImageOptim.
- Consider running images on a different domain or sub domain.
- MORE TOOLS: https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/8-excellent-tools-for-optimizing-your-images/
- TWO here I particularly like are SuperGIF & SuperPNG (SuperPNG is a PhotoShop plugin) SuperPNG is supposed to losslessly compress these.
CSS:
- Minify CSS.
- Alphabetize key values within CSS.
- Be strategic with CSS. Only run a CSS file that is specifically needed for that page so the server doesn’t have to search through a HUGE file to serve the correct values.
- Run CSS files before JavaScript.
- Consider running CSS on a different domain or sub domain.
- MORE TOOLS:
Scripts:
- Minify JavaScript.
- Make all JavaScript code external.
- Combine external JavaScript.
- Defer parsing of JavaScript (when you can) This means to defer loading of JavaScript until it is actually needed. This could help the initial load speed of the page and would force the JavaScript to load only when it needs to be executed.
- Make conditional statements to only load needed scripts and styles on a specific page instead of loading everything.
- Consider running scripts on a different domain or sub domain.
WHERE TO KEEP TRACK AND MONITOR LOAD SPEED
- Test your site on Pingdom.com. (there is a free version)
- Utilize Google Page Insights to test your website’s load speed.
Have you done any of these steps for your website? Noticed a difference? Share your page load secrets and tips here.
Interested in a page load speed consultation? Email us here for a free analysis!