9 Tips to Make Your Website Load Much Faster (Part 2)
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9 Tips to Make Your Website Load Much Faster (Part 2)
5. Your Bandwidth Is Slow - Most larger web hosts will have multiple bandwidth providers so that if one gets jammed, they can switch to another bandwidth provider to ensure the fastest connection and load times for your website. An easy way to see if your hosting provider is partnered with large bandwidth providers is by running a trace route test. Once you have completed the test, check to see if it has references to major bandwidth providers such as Sprint, Level(3) Communications, MCI-Verizon, Mzima and AT&T. Smaller hosts may not have the capacity to invest in these types of partnerships, causing a bottleneck in speed. An example of where you should look to see major bandwidth providers referenced in a ping test can be seen here:
6. Your Databases Are Poorly Optimized - There are literally hundreds of ways you can optimize your site’s databases to speed up load times on your webpages. Here are a few suggestions to start:
• Optimize WordPress.
• Use phpMyAdmin to optimize a database.
• Optimize Joomla and Mambo.
Similar tweaks can be made for all the software you are using on the back end of your website to increase page load times. Google has thousands of engineers that adjust their site as needed to keep load times consistent.
7. Your CSS Files Are Over 75KB – To ensure your website loads quickly, it is a good idea to keep your CSS files between 15-30KB, however if you have a large website, your files may need to be larger. Regular website maintenance should involve cleaning up old pieces of your site that you don’t use. If you have lots of CSS elements that are no longer in use, it can really slow down your user’s experience. A few other quick tips include expressing basic colors in four letter hex codes as opposed to six and consolidating your CSS classes. After a while these changes can add up and reduce your load time.
8. Reduce Your Code and Use JavaScript Compression - Another way to increase page load times is by removing all unnecessary characters from the source code. An example of this would be eliminating comments. However, keep in mind that it may be difficult to read the code after you reduce it, so it may be best to do this only if you are an experienced user. You can also compress your JavaScript by running it through a compressor such as Dojo ShrinkSafe or Gzip.
9. Eliminate “Hotlinking” - Hotlinking is when someone else uses video, music or image files from your website for their own website or blog. When someone hotlinks, they are actually using your bandwidth to serve these files. There are a few clues that indicate your files have been hotlinked:
• if sites such as myspace or other social networks show up in your referrer logs.
• if you notice that a specific file is being served more often than the page that it resides on.
Once you have discovered a hotlinked file, you can do a few things to stop it. In your web host’s control panel switch on “hotlinking protection” or “inline link protection”. A more advanced approach to block hotlinks is to create an .htaccess file. This will filter out requests from other websites for the various files.
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