My website is slow, how do I speed it up?

A slow website is one of the most frustrating things on the internet for users, site owners and search engines alike. For users, a slow site causes delay in a world where content is usually served in an instant. For search engines, a slow site is a marker of low quality, so search engines rarely push slow sites to the top of search rankings. And as a site owner, a slow site means that you’re making a poor impression on your visitors and most likely not getting the results you’d want from your site. So, how do we speed up your slow website, or stop it from being slow in the first place?

What is slowing down my website?

The key to speeding up a slow website is first understanding what make a website slow in the first place. Website speed, as most users will experience it, is the time it takes for the browser to display the necessary content. So, naturally, the more content on a page, the more time (in theory) it’ll take to load.

Web files (e.g .html, .css, .js) themselves are individually very small and don’t take much time to load in (although some of their actions and requests may take some time, but the main culprits on a slow site tend to be images, videos and other embedded elements.

How do I speed things up?

Of course, we don’t want you to build sites without images and videos, far from it. In fact, you can have all the visual content you like, simply by optimising it.

Images

With images, priming them for web is often simpler than people realise. A lot of images, especially photos, are naturally designed to look nice for print. These have far more detail than you’d ever be able to render on a screen, and as a result, the files are huge and take ages to load. However, you can use multiple online tools to reduce the pixel count to 72, lower the files size whilst keeping the image quality good enough for web.

• https://tinypng.com/

Also, for things like icons, or vector based images, web browsers are perfectly capable of displaying vectors as SVGs, either as the data or the file. Either way, these files use mathematical data to generate the images, which is much quicker for a computer than loading and drawing an image, resulting in a faster web page.

Video

When it comes to video, hosting them on your server and rendering them raw is usually not a great idea. Video files are huge, even in compressed formats like .mp4, so it’s not advised for you to do that on a server that’s usually designed to handle basic web files. You’ll also use your bandwidth pretty quickly.

Instead, host your videos on YouTube or Vimeo and allow them to cleverly compress and deliver your content to your viewers with no strain on your site. Also, because it’s hosted elsewhere and you’re embedding it, rather than rendering it, it has no effect on the load time of your webpage.

Javascript

Javascript files, whilst small, are a series of instructions and actions for a website to carry out under different circumstances. Some of this needs to happen as the page is loading and can block the render of the rest of the page until it completes its task. Minifying your code and ensuring that your js functions are written in a way that minimises blocking is incredibly beneficial in speeding up your slow web page.

On top of that, only loading scripts where they need to be used is a great way to eliminate wasted resources.

Caching

Enabling caching means that the browser can save a website’s resources in its current state, meaning that repeat viewers of the website won’t have to load CSS or JS from scratch every single time until those resources change or a certain amount of time has passed.

In conclusion…

Your slow website isn’t a death sentence by any means and some simple changes can be implemented to speed it up.