How to Successfully Speed Up your Website

The load time of websites is one of the most important factor for every webmaster. Most visitors would just quit and browse further if they find your site too much slow. Today, there are many factors that can slow-down your website and you should treat them carefully.

Optimizing your website may give you a many advantages, for you and for your visitors. In this article I will show you how to successfully optimize and speed-up your website.

Speed up your Website

Below, you can find some good tips, tricks and tools that can help you to successfully improve your website overall performance, speed and functionality.

Optimize Images

Images are one of the main reasons why websites are slow and not optimized. Optimizing your images may improve the overall functionality and speed of your site. Images can be a quite large and not optimized. I recommend you to use some image formats like .JPG, .PNG or .GIF. They all have a very nice compression results.

JPG format is suitable for true-color images. PNG should be used for the flat-color images. GIF supports animated sequences. PNG and GIF does support a transparent images, but JPG not.

If you create an images for your website, be sure to save them using Save for the Web feature. Most image editing software have this feature included. This may reduce your image overall size and by that load time on your website. In most cases, you will see how much space that specific image would use.

In the other hand, you can use these free online tools to optimize images for free:

• DD Image Optimizer – Allow you to optimize GIF, JPG and PNG images up to 300kb in size.
• Free Image Optimizer – Optimize and resize JPG images, allow you to download free app too.
• PunyPNG – An online tool that dramatically reduce JPG, GIF or PNG size.

Optimize CSS

CSS can use a lot of resources and requests from your website. Every experienced webmaster should know that. It is important to optimize your CSS properly.

CSS usually uses a lot of unused code-space, making it larger and not optimized. So, you would need to clean-up that code in your .CSS files to make them respond quickly and effectively.

Luckily, there are many quality tools on the internet which can do this work for you completely for free:

• Clean CSS – A very good and effective online CSS optimization tool.
• CSS Optimizer – Another good and effective CSS optimizer.

Optimize JavaScripts

Java Scripts can take more resources than CSS or even images. JS code is usually complex and a quite large. It is important to optimize your JavaScript files properly to improve your overall website speed and response time.

This can be done by removing a blank and not-used code from your .JS files. Similar process to CSS optimization, but .JS files can be large even more than 100kb. Also, try to place this code only on pages which use them, if you can of course.

Of course, there are some tools on the internet which can do this work for you for free:

• Free JS Optimizer – Optimize your JavaScript code online.
• Free Online JS Optimizer – As it name says, free online JavaScript optimization tool.
• JavaScript Tidy – A simple and effective online JS optimizer.

Use a Slash on your Links

When a server opens a link like http://www.bashbosh.com/about it will need to figure out what kind of webpage is contained on that specific address. Making your server respond a little slower because of that process.

It is recommended to place a slash “/” after that particular link to speed-up the process. This way, a server would already know that address is related to the directory and open it faster. So, in this case, link address would be like: http://www.bashbosh.com/about/.

Anyway, this would not give you the unbelievable improvement in speed. But when it comes to speeding up a website every small bit helps for sure.

Reduce HTTP Requests

When a visitor open your website every object on the page like images, scripts or css files are requesting to operate properly, causing your server to work. Those HTTP requests can drastically slow down your website response time. Specially, if you tend to use a multiple objects.

First thing you should do here is to reduce the number of objects on your website. Get rid of unnecessary images, JavaScript codes and CSS styles. You can also combine 2 or more object elements into one file like show on the below example:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/header.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/side.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/footer.css" />

Try to merge all 3 above objects into single one like:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type”text/css” href=”/style.css” />

This way you can automatically improve the overall response time of your website. Be sure to include all necessary style information in that single file.