Do you want your website to load faster? After all, most Internet users are impatient. If your website does not load at a satisfactory rate, you will end up losing traffic. In fact, Google even considers page speed to be a decisive factor in search engine rankings. Naturally, it is not just beneficial but even mandatory to have a website that loads blazing fast.
Let us take a look at some simple steps that you can take in order to speed up your website.

The Groundwork

Before you actually start using any tools to improve the page load times for your website, you need to figure out how your website fares in terms of page speed.
Basically, a website takes time to load if there are various HTTP requests made to the server. The longer such requests take, the slower your website will load. Examples of such requests include loading of scripts, images, stylesheets, and so on.

In order to understand and analyze your website’s page speed performance, you can use tools such as Google PageSpeed or Yahoo! YSlow. Both of these tools help you optimize your website and improve page load times.
Another really useful tool is GTmetrix, which uses both Yahoo! YSlow and Google PageSpeed to analyze your website’s speed and offer recommendations and suggestions for the same. You can download your results in a PDF file, and there are separate tips and recommendations for WordPress websites.

Compressing and Scaling Images

No matter how big or small or website is, at some point or the other, you will make use of images. Maybe you upload an image as a Featured Image with each blog post, or probably you offer screenshots with your tutorials. If this is the case, you should consider compressing your images for web quality. Google PageSpeed has a default image compressor, though for all practical purposes, I find TinyPNG.org to be the most useful. It works only with PNG files, and all you need to do is upload your images, and it will compress them and offer you the compressed versions for download.

Caching and CDN

Using cached versions of static content to speed up your website has been in vogue for quite some time now. You can start with browser caching, though you should also implement certain other site-wide steps. You may even try Alternative PHP Cache if you are not on a shared host (most web hosts disable it on shared servers since it has server-side effects).

If you are using a CMS such as Joomla! or Concrete5, you already have caching and other features built-in and you just need to activate and configure them. For WordPress users, the best step is to install and use a caching plugin. I will keep this one short and simple: SpeckyBoy has a guide to help youchoose the best caching plugin. I personally use Hyper Cache Extended.
A Content Delivery Network, or CDN, can go a long way in improving the page load times of your website. Simply put, a CDN has a global infrastructure of servers that can not only help in reducing the load on your web host but also increase page speeds by dynamically serving content from the servers that are closest to the visitor’s location. If yours is a busy website with a lot of visitors and media content, you should consider investing in a CDN. The options are plenty, and you should choose one that suits your needs (once again, SpeckyBoy hasgot your back on this too). SpeckyBoy uses MaxCDN, which integrates well with W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress.

CSS Sprites, JavaScript

If your page loads slow on account of multiple images, you can cut down this number by combining images into CSS Sprites. In easier words, a CSS Sprite is a combination of multiple images put together to form one image. Say, for example, instead of having your web browser load five different images; you can make it load just one using a CSS Sprite. The easiest way to accomplish the same is via SpriteMe, a free tool that lets you create CSS Sprites.

Apart from that, you can also decide to defer the parsing of JavaScript. Ideally, JS should be called at the end of an HTML document, because if JS is present at the top of the document, it can slow down the rendering of the page. You can use the “defer” attribute to defer the parsing of the JavaScript until the page has been loaded,

Additional steps that you can take include combining JavaScript and CSS files. If you are using a CMS, the chances are that your website will rely on various CSS and JS files, which can invariably slow down the load times. You can combine such scripts and stylesheets into larger files and improve page speed.

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