How’s the diet going? It might be time to put your website on one too. As we all know, speed is really important nowadays, and many websites are bogged down by a significant amount of code which isn’t used any more. Yours could well be one of these, and a good new year’s detox may be exactly what it needs.
If you’ve got a website developer, internal or external, it could well be a good investment of time or money to get them to take a serious look at a whole range of speed-related aspects. Start by using GTmetrix or Google’s Test My Site to analyse your own page speed. That’ll give you some recommendations and a benchmark.
Then here’s a list of things to investigate, in no order of priority, which I’ll leave to you and your website developer to research!
- Defer JavaScript loading
- Enable Gzip compression
- Minify and combine files
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Optimize CSS delivery
- Prioritize above-the-fold content (lazy loading)
- Reduce image dimensions
- Reduce the number of plugins, tags and scripts
- Run a compression audit
- Use a CDN
- Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files
Most sites will be able to make improvements in several of these areas, and even if only one or two result in a significant impact, it could make a difference in how search engines view the site …as well as providing a better visitor experience.