Everyone has at some point tried to click into a website, after which it takes several seconds to load the page. Often, the user does not wait more than 2 seconds before choosing to go back and click into one of the other results from Google. Google has therefore also started to “punish” pages that are slow, as they want to give their users the best experience. Many also believe that Google uses data from internet users, who have installed the chrome browser. This way they can gather statistics on how the website performs when users visit the page and not just from their crawler. In this article I will come up with concrete tips on how to speed up your website.
Test the website in an online speed test
The first step is always to identify how the Website is doing now. For this I often use GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights. Here you get an overview of how fast the website loads and what score the website gets from 0-100. The score is often set based on which parameters are optimized and not based on the actual speed of the website.
The typical culprits
After many of my speed optimizations, I have experienced that the following has had the greatest impact.
Always remember to back up before following the tips below.
Plugins
One of the big culprits is plugins. WordPress is, for example, one of the systems with the most plugins available. If you need a specific feature, you can probably find a plugin that can do exactly that.
However, this often creates problems, as you end up having installed far more plugins than you really need, and many of these plugins can be quite heavy for the website, as most have more features than you actually need.
The best thing to do is to do a walkthrough where you disable them one at a time and remove the ones that are not needed. You can advantageously disable them for a period of time, so you are sure that you do not need them before they are permanently deleted.
Pictures
Websites today consist of more large images and videos than they did 10 years ago. Therefore, it is equally important that you compress your images. Many of the websites I have come across over time have had images that are far larger than the website needs or not compressed at all. Images that take up over 1 megabyte are far too large as a rule of thumb.
You can advantageously scale images or run it through, for example, tinypng, which is a tool that compresses images.
Means
Many resource files (CSS and Javascript) tend to constitute many requests. The number of requests is absolutely essential to reduce, as they all constitute a so-called ”Call” to the server. A fine number of requests is about 75 and down. In other words, this means that the website will ”ask” the server 75 times for each time the Website is loaded. I have speed optimized this page: dingaveguide, where I have managed to reduce the number of requests from 107 to 25. This succeeded with the help of the plugin: autooptimize.
Caching
Caching also has a lot of impact on speed. Caching basically stores all the files from the website in the visitor’s browser, so that the website already has the necessary files the next time the user visits the website. This significantly increases the speed for returning users. For this, I often use the Total cache plugin, as it has very advanced settings.
Hosting
The server also has very big influence on whether the website performs well. No matter how well the Website is optimized, your server has the last thing to say. Most websites do fine with a normal web space from, for example, unoeuro, but if you start to have a lot of traffic and want a better speed, then you can advantageously upgrade your server solution to a VPS (virtual private server). A VPS actually means that you do not share the server with other websites. Most vps also have a large memory and CPU power by default. However, they also usually cost from 700 kr. monthly and upwards.
If you follow the above tips, you should be able to quickly see progress in the speed of your website.
Summary
Article
Speed optimization of website
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Everyone has at some point tried to click into a website, after which it takes several seconds to load the page. Often, the user does not wait more than 2 seconds before they…
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IT-Artikler. dk
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IT-Artikler. dk
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Written d. 25 sep 2018 – No comments
