5 Ways to Speed Up Your Website
At Hive we understand that a website is only as good as it's loading time. According to a recent survey users now expect a load time of 2 - 3 seconds or less! So for this Friday’s Take 5ive we have gone a bit techy (which rhymes with Treky… which has ended up being the blog theme, why not it’s Friday eh?!)
1. Reduce server response time and prosper
You should set a target of 200ms for your server response time. There are a few ways you can do this and here are our top two suggestions:
- Review your web hosting and pay to improve the quality and scope
- Visit Google’s PageSpeed tool to learn about best-practice and how to fix any speed or user issues
2. Set Phasers to Optimise
If you optimise your CSS delivery to use an external style sheet over an inline CSS this is preferable as it reduces the size of your code and creates fewer code duplications.
3. Speed me up, Scotty
Every piece of code on your website adds to the size of your page by minifying your code your site stays at warp speed. Remove any needless indentation, extra spaces and line breaks in your code.
4. Caching is not futile
Browser and database caching has a big impact on loading times. In simple terms this works by marking certain parts of your page that are unlikely to change often (your logo for example) and only loading this once every month, year, or whatever schedule you decide. Database caching has a big impact on speed for both new and repeat visitors, browser caching improves speed for repeat visitors.
5. I’m a Doctor, not a HTTP request
Did you know that 80% of a web page’s load time is taken up loading all the different parts of the page such as style sheets, scripts, Flash, etc. The best way to ensure quick rendering time inludes:
- Making sure that elements are streamlined on your page
- Where possible combine multiple style sheets
- Use CSS instead of images
- Reduce scripts and put them at the bottom of the page
That's it for another Friday folks (does Vulcan salute and leaves office)
* It has been requested to put on record from the managing director that “Star Wars is way better than Star Trek”
