7 Ways To Speed Up Your Website

Is your website suffering from slow page load speed? Fear not! In this article, we’ll discuss several optimization techniques to help speed up your website. If you’re unfamiliar with the term "page load speed," check out our previous article, which explains what it is and how it can impact your website and SEO. Before implementing the techniques below, take a moment to review your current web hosting package. A well-optimized server can significantly enhance your website’s speed.

Enable Gzip Compression

Enabling gzip compression can reduce your website’s file size by up to 70%, significantly decreasing page load times. Start by asking your hosting provider if gzip is already enabled, or check using this simple test. If gzip isn’t enabled, here’s a straightforward way to do it:

Ask your hosting provider or web design agency to enable it for you. If they can’t help, add the following code to your .htaccess file:

mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$

Note: If you only want to compress certain file types make sure you remove or include the correct file types in the code above.

Leverage Browser Cache

Another quick and easy way to give your website an extra speed boost is to use browser caching. When enabled, browser caching will essentially store certain files and resources in the user’s web browser. This means the first time a user visits a website they will have to download all of the website files and resources as normal, however if they revisit the website or navigate to a different page they will have certain files already stored so they won’t have to download them again. A simple way to enable browser caching is to copy and paste the code below into your .htaccess file.

# One year for image files
<filesMatch ".(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=31536000, public"

# One month for css and js
<filesMatch ".(css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2628000, public"

Note: The code above caches image files for one year and CSS & JavaScript files for one month. To change the cache length, please adjust the specified max-age (in seconds) in each code block.

Reduce The Number Of Redirects

301 redirects are useful for changing the structure of your website or handling old pages that are no longer available. However, too many redirects can slow down your website's response time.

Use a CDN (Content Distribution/Delivery Network)

Using a CDN can improve your website’s speed, particularly if you have a popular website serving an international audience. A CDN is a network of servers that stores copies of your website at different geographical locations. It delivers your website based on the user’s physical location. Generally speaking, the closer the user is to the server, the faster they’ll receive your website.

Lazy Loading

Typically, when a user visits a web page, their browser attempts to load every asset all at once, which can slow down page load speed, especially for feature-rich pages with many images. Lazy loading is a programming technique that loads content when it’s needed, rather than all at once. You may have noticed this when additional content is downloaded as the user scrolls, or when an image loads as low resolution and then transitions to a higher resolution version.

Optimised Images

One of the most obvious yet overlooked speed optimisation techniques is image optimisation. Ensuring images are no larger than needed and properly compressed for the web will improve website speed and is considered best practice. If you don't have access to a graphics program like Photoshop, use an online tool like compressor.io.

Another common mistake is resising images using CSS. While this helps images appear sharp on high pixel density devices (e.g., smartphones), it forces the device to download the full-size image, even though it's only displayed at half size. A better approach is using the srcset attribute. Here’s an example of using srcset with display density descriptors to serve images based on the device's resolution:

<img src="/images/example-small-img.jpg" 
srcset="/images/example-small-img.jpg 1x, /images/example-lrg-img.jpg 2x" 
alt="example image description..." />

Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Minifying your website’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files is another quick and easy way to reduce your page load speed. Minifying essentially means removing spaces, commas, and unnecessary formatting from your code. This can dramatically decrease the size of your website files. There are countless online tools that can do this for you, such as jscompress.

Note: Depending on your project and workflow, it is possible to automate the process of bundling and minifying assets using tools like Gulp.js.

To Sum Up

While there are other optimisation techniques to speed up your website, the seven we've described above are perhaps the easiest to implement and a great place to get started. If you would like further advice regarding website speed optimisation or SEO performance, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.