How can I make my website faster?
Have you ever been searching for something, found a result and clicked on a page where nothing happened? It not only is frustrating, but, if you are a business, that means that you will be losing out on potential profit. During peak traffic periods, more than three fourths of consumers left for a competitor’s website instead of suffering a delay. But it’s not a secret to how to fix that. The problem is that there is a whole lot of misguidance out there that makes it hard for site owners like you and me to identify the solutions that really work.
Get rid of the extra stuff
There are many tools to analyze your site speed, like Pingdom, Google PageSpeed insights, Yahoo!Yslow and WebPage Test. These scoring tools let you look at potential issues and advise on best practices, but they will not solve your site’s problems for you. Unnecessary plugins and add-ons can reduce your website speed by a lot, and it’s especially important to pay attention to them if you use blogging CMSs like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. It’s very important to note that it’s not just about the number of plugins you have installed on your website but about the quality as well; generally, you want to avoid plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles, plugins that perform lots of remote requests and plugins that add extra database queries to every page on your website.
A cache is a place to store something temporarily in a computing environment. In computing, active data is often cached to shorten data access times, reduce latency and improve input/output. Caching ensures a much faster experience for your website users by storing a version of your website on their browser and serving them that version until your website is updated or until you instruct it to refresh the version of your website they are served. Studies show that doing this can reduce the website loading time from 2.4 seconds to less than one second which again means the difference between successful hits to your website.
Most sites are hosted on servers in the US, and while these websites will generally be faster for people in the US or people visiting with a US VPN, your website will be a slower for people from other parts of the world. If everything you’re doing to make your website faster isn’t working, or you’re only noticing little, insignificant difference in site speed from following best practices, perhaps it’s time to change your web host. A slow website is bad not only for the end-user, but also for search engine optimization so if you are investing in these services, you may be throwing money at something that will never work.
Bad code means a bad site, end of story. This is why you need to choose a crisp, clean theme. You want to keep your plugin folder and everything else as clean as you can. Try to keep only the plugins that you need for essential functionality. Even the best server configuration will not save your site and coding if you use a crappy theme with bloated code; make sure you also consider performance when looking for a website theme, not just aesthetics. And of those, keep only the ones with solid, proven code behind them that are actively supported.
