How can I speed up my website?

With mobile internet usage being absolutely huge these days, and with mobile web browsers often using 3G and 4G to connect to the internet, it has never been more important for your website to load quickly.  After all, we all know that if a webpage is not quick loading, we’re off elsewhere to find another website to look at.

So what can we do to improve the page loading speed of our website?

We’ll there are a number of tricks and techniques that we can use to speed up our websites, and here’s a few of the key methods that you can implement to super-charge your website loading times…

• Enable GZIP Compression.  Having your server return information to your website visitors browser in a compressed format can significantly speed up the delivery of your website.  You’ll need access to the .htaccess file on your server to do this.  There are no costs associated in carrying this out and the benefits are huge.
• Optimise your images.  When uploading images to your server, make sure that they are scaled to the exact image dimensions at which they will be displayed by your visitors web browser.  Uploading images that are too large will result in your visitors having to wait whilst these large images are downloaded.  For example, if you we’re to upload a poster sized graphic to your server, only to have it displayed as a thumbnail image on your website, your visitor will still have to wait whilst the full poster sized image downloads, just to see the thumbnail.
• Minify your CSS.  Many websites contain a lot of CSS coding.  Compressing the CSS can reduce network latency, enhance compression, and speed up browser loading and execution.

For more information on page loading times, or to test the speed of your own website, visit the GTMetrix website.  It will give you everything you need to make some key improvements to your own website.