Website Optimization – An Addiction To Speed

Speed plays a more active role in the way websites are ranked today. If your website is slow no matter how much your tried to optimize your website, your webhosting may by the culprit.

One of the major factors that can be directly attributed to slow websites is the webhosting plan they’re running on. In all fairness, do you really want to waste you money on a company that delivers sub par service?

Let’s look at it from another perspective. Would you tolerate waiting hours for your food at a restaurant? Probably not. We have certain expectations when we pay for something. But unfortunately webhosting is not usually one of them. This is why a lot of people, both new and more advanced, will first look into website optimization before they suspect their webhost.

I have been building websites for nearly ten years, and I have had my share of webhosting. Some of it was good, the majority let something to be desired, at least in one form or another. And yes, in the beginning I thought that there must be something I was doing wrong. And I invested countless hours into website optimization when in fact it was slow webhosting.

So what are you in need of, some website optimization or new webhosting?

Have you already looked through every potential cause for the slowdown? There are free diagnostic tools that can be helpful in analyzing your website. One of them is YSlow from Yahoo! If you can’t find any problems, sometimes the only answer is a slow server. This can also be a sign of a slow connection to your database. But if you can check all of that, you’ve probably already begun suspecting your webhosting.

Have you optimized your use of graphics? The reliance on too many, or too large of images on your website can be a point of slowdown. This should be more than website optimization, this should be standard operating procedure when you make your website.

Here are some things that will be helpful. Reduce your reliance on graphics. Many things that people use graphics for could easily be done in CSS. This makes things run faster, and it saves you bandwidth.

Reduce the number of images you use. This doesn’t mean you have to get rid of them, but you can put many images into a CSS sprite. This sprite only needs to load once rather than each image loading individually.

Compression. Again, this is something that you should make a habit of doing. Website optimization can happen at any point in the creation process. If you compress your images in the beginning, you won’t have to go back and do it later. You’ll end up saving a lot of time by compressing your images when you make them.

Do you use widgets? This is a common error a lot of people make when they make their first WordPress blog. Many webhosting plans really aren’t cut out for so many calls to the database. When you add a lot of widgets to your website, you stress an already overworked server and slowdown is the result. If you remove some of the widgets and plugins that you don’t really need, you will be making good headway with website optimization.

JavaScript is another thing you will want to watch out for. If it isn’t well written or there is too much reliance on it, you can suffer slowdowns. One thing to remember when you use JavaScript on your website, not all of the modern browsers run it very fast. This can give the illusion that your website is running slow. One way to test if your site is running slowly because of the scripts is to remove them and see if there is an improvement.

Website optimization can only do so much, if you are having trouble getting the website’s speed to improve, it might be due to a slow webhosting. Click here to get an idea of what affordable webhosting should look like.

Curious to learn what other methods of website optimization there are? Did you know that website optimization can generate traffic, stop letting your competition have all the fun. Get in the game today!