improve website speed

1. The fastest pages in the world are HTML files, so my suggest is to switch to static website, instead of using CMS.

2. Reduce the HTML output size by removing redundant spaces inside HTML tags, CSS code and Java Script.

3. Optimize images – reduce images size by editing them with simple Paint or Photoshop. There are many online tools to do it: Shrinkpictures, Resize2mail, Picresize and so on.

4. Do not overload your pages with too many images – it will slow the page load time – no more than two images in each webpage.

5. Social Widgets like Facebook, Google +1 and others may slow down your pages, so if you must use them, put the code in the bottom of the HTML code.

6. Caching – a web cache is a mechanism for the temporary storage of web documents, such as HTML pages, CSS, JavaScript and images in order to reduce bandwidth usage and server load. Make sure to enable cache for your website – it will help to serve the webpages faster.

If you are using WordPress, the best way to apply caching is to use plugins, but if you have other CMS or static website, the best way to do this is by .htaccess file or PHP.

7. The last tip is to load the navigation menus after the content – make sure to show your title and content loading first, because this is what users have been looked for – don’t make them wait.

If your website is still slower than your Grandma, use the tools bellow to speed up your pages:

1. Page Speed Check – Google Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to speed up your site. Basically, I check my websites with PageSpeed check tool or FireBug page speed plugin for Firefox.

2. Test DNS server – check if its DNS servers are configured correctly and have no errors that may slow the all thing.

3. JavaScript optimizer – optimize your JavaScript code by removing comments, whitespace as well as other unnecessary characters. In other words compressing the code to smaller size.

4. CSS optimizer – optimizing CSS files. The tool helps you get smaller CSS file and better written code. The way the optimizer works actually lets you decide how much compression you want: from super compressed (unreadable ) to visually pleasing. My best practice with CSS compression is to compress the code to “visually pleasing” and delete blank lines or spaces.

1. Use an image editing program that provides a “Save for Web” setting

Images are by their very nature pretty big. If your webpage is loading images as-is it can dramatically lower your page load time. A “Save for Web” setting will export your image in a compressed file size. Also, don’t forget to specify the original file size in your HTML code (i.e. 500 pixels x 300 pixels). Not specifying these dimensions means your web browser will have to work harder to display the image, thus increasing page load time dramatically.

2. Keep HTML coding to a minimum

Many webmasters, perhaps you, use WYSIWYG (…what you see is what you get) type HTML editors. These programs though add a lot of unnecessary code to your page and thus, slow page load time down tremendously. Examples of unnecessary coding include “comment” lines and “date stamps” to name a few. One program you can use to compress your coding is the GZip HTML Compression tool.

3. Consolidate Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) and JavaScript

These days, every page has at least one cascading stylesheet (CSS), third-party application or JavaScript file to load before the page will function properly. This can slow even the smallest of web pages. Therefore, it’s best to force the browser to fetch as little external information as possible. Consolidate your CSS sheets down to one if possible and embed them at the HEAD of the individual page.

4. Control how your site content is ‘cached’

Demarking and controlling how your site’s content is cached by the search engines will dramatically speed up your page load time. How you do this depends on the type of server you’re hosting your site on.

For an Apache server, you can physically adjust the “Expires” or “Cache control” header attributes. The process for a Windows server is similar and involves manipulation of the HTTP ‘client cache’ element. And if your site is hosted through WordPress, download and install the WP Super Cache plug-in which serves up static HTML pages to the majority of your audience and dramatically boosts page load time.

5. Reduce the amount of cookies

Consider downloading and installing a free ad-on like View Cookies for Mozilla Firefox to monitor the amount of cookies being exchanged between you and your site’s visitors. Review these cookies and see which ones you can reduce in size or eliminate altogether. If you can’t recognize the cookie, then you probably don’t need it. The fewer cookies your page has, the faster it will load.