Slow websites are a pain, especially when trying to complete time critical tasks. For example, a slow SatNav becomes almost useless when trying to navigate.
Before starting, it’s best to measure your website speed. This can be done by one of these free services: Pingdom, PageSpeed Insights and YSlow. Not only will they give your website a score, they’ll also provide some tips to improve speed.
Hand Coded have outlined 4 ways to make your website faster.
Your hosting platform can have a dramatic impact on your website speed. Cheap solutions often mean that your website is hosted on one server along with lots of other websites. This means that you share resources with other businesses.
A dedicated server can give you dedicated resources, but it means that it’s difficult to upgrade to a larger solution. A Virtual Private Server (VPS) can be more flexible, but make sure you use a good provider.
Large, uncompressed images can dramatically slow down your website. It’s strongly advisable to compress your images before uploading them. Good software can often shave off 30% to 60% of the image size. You can use free software such as Gimp or online tools https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/.
There are two ways you can do this: minification and gzipping (or compression). According to CSS genius Chris Coyier:
“Minification does things like removing whitespace, removing comments, removing non-required semicolons, reducing hex code lengths…”
Gzipping, meanwhile:
“finds all repetitive strings and replaces them with pointers to the first instance of that string.”
This means that your website will load faster. Hand Coded will do all this for you, so you don’t have to do anything.
Plugins and scripts, which are often installed with WordPress, can sometimes slow down your website and introduce security vulnerabilities.
It’s best practice to disable or remove any unused plugins to fix any potential issues.