Make my site go faster

Assess your speed

Check your load speed by visiting Google labs and typing in your site name.

You will get a rating out of 100 and you will get suggestions on how to improve your speed and the culprits behind the slowness will be listed – for example large images.

Resize and Optimise Images

Everytime you add an image to your website make sure its optimised first. This makes the file size way smaller without losing the quality of the image. The smaller the files size the faster your site will load.

Open your image in Photoshop. Select Image> Image Size and resize your image so that it’s no more than 600px x 600px – if you know the exact size you’ll need them for your site then resize them to this.

Next select “save for web and devices” and check the “optimized” box. You can select to view “4-up” as in, four images in the screen, giving you previews to what the image will look like on the web. Select whatever is the lowest file size you can get away with whilst maintaining a good quality image, you will need a good pair of eyes for this bit. Your file size will be about 8-10 times smaller than a regularly saved jpeg so that will make you very happy, I know it.

GZip

Sometimes it will recommend compressing content using GZip. There is a great plugin called WordPress Gzip Compression which will help solve the issue.

All for the Cache

If your problem is to do with cache, and you have a WordPress site, there are some great plug-ins to help you improve your speed: W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache can help. What might also help is to edit your .htaccess file and add this code, which sets an expiry date for your bits and bobs:

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/png “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType text/css “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/pdf “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access 1 year”
ExpiresDefault “access 2 days”
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##

I got that tip from this blog. Don’t ask me what cache is…