A fast website is a better experience for your users and leads to more sales and engagement with your content. A fast website has an added benefit of ranking higher in Google’s search results. Google has made it well known that they take site speed into account when serving search results. This means you should optimize your site for speed as much as possible.
Site Analysis
We will do an analysis of your site and tell you an average load time. We’ll also explain what this means, how it might compare to other sites, and what a good target would be for your site’s load time. We’ll also tell you about changes to your site or server that you can make. We try to make suggestions that will make the biggest impact on improved load times and that you can actually have control over. Based on our conversation we will tell you what you might be able to do yourself and what you might need to hire someone else to do.
Set Up WordPress Caching Plugins
If you run a WordPress based site we can set up a caching plugin that can dramatically improve your site’s load time. While many people use these plugins they work best when they are properly configured for your site. We will make sure that the caching plugin that runs on your site is optimized for your content, that it properly refreshes the cache when content is updated, and that it doesn’t break your site or degrade your user’s experience.
Remove Unnecessary WordPress Plugins
If you run a WordPress site then chances are pretty good that you’re running quite a few plugins. Plugins are great for adding functionality to your site and we use them too. However using too many plugins can slow your site down considerably. Some people use plugins for functionality that can be added in other ways. We will take a look at your plugins and ask questions about the functionality they add to your site. We’ll then make recommendations based on our conversation and can remove the plugins for you and replace the necessary functions they provided.
Remove Unnecessary Scripts
Many websites run several different scripts to add functionality. A lot of times these scripts are added after sites are first published to add functions that weren’t previously imagined. There are a lot of great tutorials online for simply adding some code to your site and many people just copy and paste. There may be scripts that aren’t needed or that duplicate the function of another script. We will suggest scripts that can be removed and will remove them for you. We will also move scripts to the bottom of the page so they don’t block other content from loading first.
Set Up Server Side Caching
When you have your own server that your website is hosted on it gives you a lot of flexibility. One way we can help your site with significant speed improvements is by setting up server side caching. Your site will be able to serve significantly more visitors and it will do so much faster.
Set Up A CDN To Serve Static Files
We can set up Amazon Web Services (AWS) to serve specific files for your site. This helps improve site load times by offloading some of the burden off your server. It also helps because it allows for content to load simultaneously from another connection instead of waiting for a piece of content from your server to load.
We set up an AWS S3 bucket to store your files. Then we set up Amazon Cloudfront to act as the CDN serving those files to your site visitors. If your site runs on WordPress we can set up a plugin to automatically add specific files you upload, such as images, to your S3 bucket and properly link to them as well.
Optimize Images For Your Site
Often people don’t realize that images used on websites don’t need to be super high resolution. They find an image they like or one they took themselves and upload it as is. Some platforms deal with these images in really smart ways by optimizing them on the server. Sometimes the platform you use doesn’t do this and it results in your webpages loading very slowly and using storage space and bandwidth that isn’t necessary.
We can look through your site and optimize all of your images for you. If you have your own web server we can even set up some tools that will automatically optimize images so you don’t have to think about it in the future. Additionally, we can teach best practices for editing images so they are optimized when you upload them.