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Improving Your Site Performance: How to Get Started

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The performance of your website is an important metric to track. There are a lot of things that depend on how well your site performs, including the site’s SEO performance, user experience, and its future success. Needless to say, taking steps to improve site performance is not only necessary, but also very important.

The big question is, where do you start? There are so many things you can do to improve your site’s performance. We are going to take a look at the top steps to take as you start the process of fine-tuning the website.

Check Your Hosting

Server response time and the performance of your hosting service are the first things to check and improve. You want a server that responds well to requests, even when your site is experiencing a spike in visitors. Many hosting providers offer this level of service through the use of cloud computing and newer server technologies.

Going for a hosting service designed to work with a certain platform is also a valuable option to consider.

Optimize Your Images

The next thing you can do is optimize your images. Images can make a site look so much bigger than it should. Fortunately, images are also very easy to optimize for web purposes. If you design the site yourself, you can export images without unnecessary data like color profile and metadata to reduce their size.

You can tinker with SSH and programs like JPEGOPTIM to remove metadata and other unnecessary information from images that are already on your server. JPEGOPTIM will even go a step further and compress the images using a lossless technology.

Leverage Compression

Speaking of compressing images, there is a lot to gain from compressing the files you deliver to users when they access your site. Compressed images are great examples of how good compression – implemented properly – can further reduce the size (and loading time) of your site. On average, compressed images are around 40% smaller than the uncompressed files.

Similar to optimizing images, compression is also something you can do on the fly. You can configure your server to automatically compress CSS, JS, and HTML files to boost site performance. You also have the option to ask your server admin to configure the server for compression if you don’t know your way around servers.

Make Do with What You Need

We often add new CSS files, scripts, and unnecessary lines of codes to a site. These codes may have been useful when you were testing things during the development of your site. When they are no longer in use, however, they need to go.

Do some cleanups and eliminate scripts, CSS tags, and other things that the site no longer uses. There are a few apps that can automate most of the process, but doing a thorough manual check is still the best way to go. The same can be said for unused plugins or themes when your site is based on a CMS platform like WordPress.

Alternatively, you can contact a company like WP Siteplan who specializes in improving the speed of websites.  They have a number of ways to improve the efficiency of your site, and their professionals can help get your website up to speed.

These tips can really boost the performance of your site by a substantial margin. Even better, they are all easy to implement. Start today, take the necessary steps to improve your site’s performance, and deliver a much better user experience to your visitors.

I am a frontend and backend web developer who loves building up new projects from scratch. In my blog "Lingulo" me and some guest authors regularly post new tutorials, web design trends or useful resources.

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