Speed of your blog impacts a lot on your search engine rankings. Google wants to provide a better user experience while they are looking for a content on Google. The search engine giants uses more than 200 signals to rank a website or a blog on its Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Here are several tricks and tips to speed up website to load faster as lightning.
Recently, Google introduced mobile-friendliness as one of the factor to rank a page on its search results page.This also denotes that each website or blog that wants to rank higher should adapt to any device and also should load faster. We need to consider how quickly pages can load in few seconds. As most of the users use mobile on-the-go, it is essential to make the page load faster even on slower cellular data connections.
If you are a blogger or a web master, you can analyse what's making your site to load slower with Google PageSpeed. Also, you can use Pingdom Tools to check the size of your website that actually gets downloaded on client's node. It gives you much more detailed stats of your website.
If you are using WordPress, then you are lucky as you can find a lot of tools available as a plugin. Here are some of the tools and tricks with which you can speed up your website to load at lightning fast. Some of the tools might be working only for WordPress blogs but most of the mentioned tricks and tools below work for other CMS too, or you can make them work on it.
TinyPNG
TinyPNG is the most powerful and impressive tool for both web masters and people who work on high-resolution photographs. TinyPNG uses lossless compression technique and works best for most of the images. The quality or dimensions of the image is never altered but the file size is highly compressed. WordPress plugin of TinyPNG doesn't work much collaboratively with WordPress and any people can use TinyPNG to compress pictures.
Autoptimize WordPress Plugin
It is much essential to compress HTML and JavaScript files so that it gets downloaded quickly into the user's browser. Autoptimize will create separate files of the one you have modified and compresses those files. The uncompressed original file is still unmodified for your site's developers to update further.
Autoptimize WordPress Plugin Page
Minifier/Beautifier
Minifiers and beautifiers are the tools that helps you to minify CSS files and also to beautify them. Minifiers removes all the white spaces that are unnecessary for the browser and thus the size of CSS files gets reduced.
Beautifier helps in getting back the CSS code neat and tidy by having minified CSS code as input and thus in case, if your developer needs to update the code, you can beautify the code and then update the code with much ease.
Online Minifiers / Beautifiers:
- jsbeautifiers.org
- codebeautify.org/css-beautify-minify
- codebeautify.org
- cleancss.com
- minifycode.com
Cache Plugins
WordPress has a plenty of cache plugins to make the site to load faster. These cache plugins also impact a lot on server's load and thus guidance from your hosing is a must for getting started with these plugins. Use the cache plugins that is recommended by your hosting.
Few most used cache plugins for WordPress are,
- WP Super Cache
- W3 Total Cache
Cloudflare CDN
Cloudflare is a free CDN service that can help your website to load faster by making the users to request your page to the nearest server located. This improves the time dramatically. To get most out of Cloudflare, you can also sign up for premium accounts.
Beware: There are several users complaining incompatibility of Cloudflare with Google AdSense. The scripts used by Cloudflare makes the AdSense's JavaScript to signal that there is some invalid activity. Users complain that this malfunction is making the Google AdSense to get banned.
Hosting
This is the most important thing you have to consider when you are about to change your hosting or while buying a hosting. Hosting companies like BlueHost US and HostGator US are providing a good site speed on shared hosting itself but if your website is seeking a lot of visitors, you can go with VPS hosting.
Minimalistic Theme
Last but not least. The new modern way to present content on web is using a minimalistic and a flat theme. The theme does not only shows up the content much clearly but also makes the website to load very much faster. Let your theme be modern, minimalistic, responsive, and SEO friendly.
If you have any other suggestions, please do a comment.