Six Ways to Speed Up Your Website

You've been there. Click. Wait. Read. Oh, wrong page. Click. Wait. Read. That one or two second delay between pages is fine, but when it doubles or triples, it becomes painful.

Users expect more than they once did. Connection speeds are faster (so a slow site is perceived as the business' fault, not the user's), and sites like Facebook, YouTube, BBC etc. run quickly for media-heavy websites. Since your visitors spend time on those sites, they effectively set a benchmark for the speed at which your business website should operate.

Rather than measure the number of seconds it takes to load your site, here's a quick and dirty test. Simply browse your website, page after page, after spending a few minutes on YouTube, Amazon or Facebook. Are your pages loading as quickly? If not, here's what you (or your web designer) can do about it.

Compress your images

Over the last few years there's been an explosion in "do it yourself" website services. Log in, write your text, upload your graphics, etc. Many, however, don't compress your images for use on the web. So if you use photography straight from you camera or from your suppliers, the file size (this isn't the same as the height and width) will be far too big for the web.

There's a trade-off between quality (avoiding pixelation) and file size, so try to strike a balance. If you have fifteen 50 kilobyte images on your home page which can be compressed to 20 kilobytes, that's a massive reduction in download time when someone views your site for the first time. (They'll be cached on subsequent visits or page views so clear your browser cache when testing!)

Remove unnecessary bells and whistles

If you have any Flash content on your site that you don't need, this should be removed. Is that animation really worth an extra five (or twenty) seconds of load time? Does it add that much value? You must factor in the number of visitors it puts off as well as any increased leads or sales (rare!) from those it impresses.

The same principle applies to fancy Javascript, AJAX (changing content without reloading the whole page), audio and video. These are all great tools when sensibly used, but when speed's an issue, keep it simple - or give visitors the choice about when to "go large".

Use the right tool for the job

If you rely too much on PDFs, your content will take too long to download. Equally, putting all your text inside images so you can use that really nice font, will take longer to download than simple plain text (not to mention the accessibility and search engine hit this brings). Do you have content in files or images that could be presented as standard HTML text? It's more user-friendly and it's quicker to download.

Clean up your HTML

Old HTML code was bloated. It took longer to load and longer for your computer to render on screen. Instead of defining rules about how headings, paragraphs or colour schemes should look once and having every occurrence of the content obey those rules, bloated HTML code defines the rules every single time they apply. It's a technical difference that most users don't see, but it affects load time.

The side-effects of cleaning up your website's HTML (by complying to the latest W3C standards) also make it worthwhile: better compatibility with other browsers (Macs and mobile devices as well as PCs, for example) and more chance of search engines like Google spidering your content and indexing you correctly.

Get a better server, closer to home

UK hosting costs more than using a USA web host, but if your customers are all on this side of the pond, it's worth spending those few extra pounds each month to decrease the distance between your users and the server they're downloading your website from. (This is especially relevant when you're making large files available for download.)

Remember also that not all servers are equal. Just as a top-of-the-range computer sitting on your desk will run faster than one from the end of the aisle in Tesco, a faster server's worth paying for. What processor is running your web host's server? How many other sites are they cramming onto the same machine? The detailed specifications are worth looking at if you're having speed problems.

(If you're running multiple servers, the way your domain is pointed to them and the way they interface with one another on the network will also affect speed dramatically.)

Use more efficient, scalable software

Good programmers think about speed from day one in a web application. Your e-commerce software or content management system fall under this heading.

For example, optimising (and minimising) calls from your website to the database that holds all your content (or product data) is crucial and a poorly programmed website can be a load time disaster. There are literally hundreds of other little programming nuances that affect a site's speed.

In the beginning, problems may not be noticeable, but as you begin to add new features or your database gets bigger (more products, more subscribers, more orders...), performance can deteriorate exponentially.