How to Speed Up Your Website
If you’ve determined that your website is slow, there are several things you can do to speed it up.
- Optimize all your images. Optimized images have a smaller file size and load faster.
- Combine, compress, and minify all javascripts and CSS files. Many sites, especially Joomla and WordPress, have dozens of seperate CSS and Javascript files. By combining, compressing, and minifying these files, you can speed up your page speed.
- Limit the number of external resources your page has to load. For example, Share This links to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc can slow down your page speed considerably, especially if those external resources are overloaded. This doesn’t mean you should get rid of all your external resources; just pay attention to how many external resources you have.
- Turn on mod_pagespeed if your host provides it. mod_pagespeed is an Apache Webserver module that optimizes your web pages BEFORE they load.
- Joomla and WordPress have their own page speed optimizer plugins.
- If you have Joomla or WordPress and your host offer mod_pagespeed, you should test your page speed using the native Joomla or WordPress plugin and then test it using the mod_pagespeed Apache module. Use the one that gives you the fastest page speeds.
- Get a Different Web Host – If you’ve tried all the suggestions above and your site is still slow, contact your web host and tell them about your site speeds. If you are on shared hosting, it’s possible that other users on the server are hogging the server resources and slowing down the server. Your host can fix this. If you host tells you they can’t do anything about your page speed, consider getting a different web host.