Easy Ways to Speed Up Your Website

A quick loading website creates win-win situations and it is good for your SEO too - Google has speed within its algorithm, and will penalise a slow loading site.
Just like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), there are on-page factors and off-page that can speed up your website. And because we love WordPress, there are lots of plugins that will help too.

On-page Factors
1. Images tend to be the largest (file size) items on a webpage. Well-optimised images with their file sizes reduced is the key, but without reducing quality. If possible, use Photoshop to resize an image and "Save for Web". Use the image as a link to the full-size image if required.

2. Adverts tend to slow pages down as they are more often loaded from external sites. If your site doesn't really benefit from advertising it may be a good idea to remove them.If you are using images that are located on an external server, save them to your local server so that they load from your images folder and set the target within your code.

3. Reduce your Flash usage to a minimum. Some flash files can take up a lot of bandwidth when loading a webpage, so try to use alternatives where possible:
1. JQuery for photo slideshows
2. Embed videos from YouTube
3. Embed music files from YouTube

4. Minimise the usage of extra files and codes that your page must load for it to work. Try and incorporate as much as you can into the source code - or remove them. Google code, compliance images, tweet and facebook 'like' buttons are also culprits of slowing down a page, so try and minimise their usage or optimise them.

5. Monitor your site's W3C compliance. By removing as many errors and warnings will clean up your code and also make it W3C compliant.

Off-page Factors
1. Having a dedicated server, i.e. not a hosting package on a shared server, can help speed up your website. Where this isn't affordable, choose a company that has decent hardware specifications that take the load time of your website seriously.

2. Incorporate gzip compression into your site will decrease page load times. Note: sometimes pages do not display on firefox so lots of testing is required to see if it fits your site.

3. Create a cache of your webapges to hasten page loads.

4. Lots of plugins will slow your website down - only use those that are necessary for your website to function.

5. Minify your CSS by removing spaces and unnecessary comments etc.