How to Speed up Your Website

The speed of a website.

The speed of a website is important because statistics show us that slow website have higher bounce rates. Sometimes your site may seem slow on your computer because you are on it so much. One of the things that I do regularly is check the speed of my website. Since I have a lot of good content on it I don’t mind if its under 5 seconds, anything above 5 seconds I start getting worried and have the desire to make it faster for my visitors. Soin this article we are going to discuss how to speed up your website!

Q. How do I speed up my website?

A. There are several things that you can do to speed up your website. The first thing we have to determine is whether you are a web developer or not. Web developers can speed up a website with caching, htaccess, putting JavaScript in the footer, use inline css. If you are not a web developer then I hope that you are on the WordPress content management system or some type of CMS.

If you are a web developer here is some code that you can use in your htaccess file to compress several file types if you are using an apache server.

Only cool people share!

You can enable gzip in your htaccess file by using the following code.

[code]<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>[/code]

Compress your picture files by using the following code.

[code]<IFModule mod_deflate.c>
<filesmatch "\.(js|css|html|jpg|png|php)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</filesmatch>
</IFModule>[/code]

You can also use this code for your html, css and more.

[code]#Gzip – compress text, html, javascript, css, xml
<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
</ifmodule>
#End Gzip[/code]

You can deflate your javascript and css files by putting the following code in your htaccess file.

[code]<files *.css>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</files>
<files *.js>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</files>[/code]

Here is another code for gif, jpeg and png images.

[code]<Location />
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|gz2|sit|rar)$ no-gzip dont-vary
</Location> [/code]

If you are not a web developer and are using the WordPress CMS then install the following plug ins.

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK AND BACK UP EVERYTHING!

wp-supercache – Its free and it works!
- For Proper settings see our article WP Super Cache Settings for Optimal Performance
WP-Optimize – FREE and it works too!
EWWW Image Optimizer – another free tool!

Other Ways to speed up your website.

Do not use large images. A computer monitor can only show 72 dpi that is 72 dots per square inch. So dont try to put an image that is 600 dpi.
If your image is 10,000 inches by 10,000 inches in size why would you want to use that? Maybe for a billboard that would come in handy. They usually measure pictures in pixels on a computer screen. This is a little tricky because converting pixels to inches depends on the computer screen resolution. Here is a pixel to inch converter tool to help you with your pictures. It will take into consideration screen size and resolution as well.
Use YouTube to host your videos. If you don’t want them available to the YouTube public, then make the video an unlisted URL and embed it into your website.

Q. How to Speed up Your Computer

A. Sometimes it is not our website that is slow, but our computer. The longer we are on it the more junk it collects stores and caches. Computing something repeatedly like a website gets redundant to a computer. It’s like telling the same things repeatedly. Sometimes it gets confused and when files are similar repeatedly going into a computing system, it tries to match cached files. The reason it does this is for speed. It is trying to deliver the information to you as fast as possible.

Steps to speed up your computer

Do a disk cleanup. You can find this by going to “Start” and type in “Disk Cleanup”. that will get rid of all the junk and temporary cache files that are slowing down your computer.
Defrag your computer. You can find this by going to “Start” then type in “Disk defrag” make sure before you do this that you have a lot of time or start it right before you go to bed.

From Microsoft

The causes of your computer being slow can include:

Not enough hard drive space, too many unused programs

Left over programs, old cached and temporary files

Too many programs running at startup or in the background

Data Corruption, hard disk fragmentation

Missing Windows updates or outdated drivers

Whatever the cause, there are lots of ways to help speed up your computer and make your PC work better—even without upgrading your hardware. This easy to follow, step by step guide will help to speed up your computer.

Remove antivirus or anti-spyware programs

In Windows XP, click Start, click Run, type appwiz.cpl, and then press Enter.
-or-
In Windows Vista, click Start. In the Start Search box, type appwiz.cpl, and then press Enter.
-or-
In Windows 7, click Start. In the Search programs and files box, type appwiz.cpl, and then press Enter.
-or-
In Windows 8, Swipe in from the right edge of the screen, tap or click Apps and then tap or click Search (or if you’re using a mouse, point to the upper-right corner of the screen, move the mouse pointer down, and then click Search).Type appwiz.cpl in Search box, and tap Appwiz.cpl on the left side of your screen.

In the list of installed programs, uninstall any other Internet security programs.

Restart your computer.

Then they give you tools to help you speed up and clean your PC.

Computer Cache

Many people don’t realize this, but there are several types of caching that is on a computer. First there is a cache in the computer itself to help things load faster. Did you ever notice the more you use a program, the faster it loads? If you use Microsoft Office Word a lot and constantly bring it up on your computer, it gets more efficient at doing it because you use it a lot. So that is #1 on our list of caching, in the computer itself.

ISP cache

OK, lets move on to the next type of caching and that would be your ISP or internet service provider. So in the office I have Armstrong cable and at my house I have ATT. When I make major changes on a website, the office computers will take several days before I actually see the changes. Yet, my home office where I have ATT will show them immediately, why? It is because of a caching mechanism put in place by your ISP called TTL or “time to live”. This is one of the most irritating things as a web developer to put up with. They can cache a website in their system for up to 30 days!

Browser Cache

This is one feature that most people are familiar with. Most browsers you can hit control F5 and do a hard refresh or just hit the refresh icon on the browser itself for a soft refresh to try and clear the cache. We have a great article on clearing browser cache that talks about that more in depth.

Search Engine Cache

Now we can talk about search engine cache. Search engines like Google love the cache feature so that their users can get to what they are looking for as soon as possible. That is their bread and butter to provide fast results to their users. However, if you are ever in Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools, you will see a copy of your old site if you recently changed it. It’s all because of the cache on the search engine itself.

Website Cache

That leads us to our last type of caching, which is website caching. These are temporary little files stored on your server and your visitors’ browsers as they visit your website. If you have a CDN or content delivery Network, it is even more aggressive. Sometimes, if these types of cache files are not set up properly, they can actually slow down your website. So make sure you do the research that is needed for a specific caching setup before you actually implement it on your website.

How to Speed up Your Internet

So the next issue might not be your computer but your internet connection. The only way to speed this up would be to order better internet service. You can check your internet speed with Internet Speed Tester. This will tell you how fast your upload speed is and your download speed. Your upload speed will always be faster than your download speed. For cable internet you will have 1 Mbps and 6 Mbps bandwidth for downloads, and bandwidth between 128 Kbps and 768 Kbps for uploads. This is a pretty good connection for surfing the internet. If you have cable going to your house and you are still experiencing slow speeds it might be your WiFi router box. I recommend Hawking Technology Hi-Gain Dual-Band Wireless-N Router (HD45R) to give you the fastest speeds.

Speed Test Website

Then there are several ways where you can test your website’s speed. Below is the list that I use. I like to use these services because not only will it tell me the speed of a website, it will show me a tree so I can target what is slowing down a website. Here is the list of website speed checker’s that I use frequently when a client is having an issue with website speed.

How to Speed up Your Website was last modified: July 21st, 2022 by Maximus Mccullough