HOW DO I SPEED UP MY WEBSITE

HOW DO I CHECK THE SPEED OF MY WEBSITE?

Speed up my website

Does the Speed of my Website matter?
Google's algorithm ranks a website based on hundreds of factors and speed can be a overarching factor. We have had clients who have had a super slow website (well over a second nearly two second loads time) and when we have asked their web designers what they can do to speed things up. They have said there is nothing wrong with the websites speed and this has nothing to do with how the website is performing in google. HOwever they did switch the site to a faster server, which was more expensive. which had little effect on reducing the websites and page load times.

So to prove a point we rebuilt the website  to get half a second load time (0.50) and hey presto page rankings in google instantly improved

So we know Google prefers fast websites. To get a fast website it needs to be written in good code, the newer the better, have very few coding errors and the content needs to be streamlined or removed that may be taking time to load.  Some CMS (contant Management System naturally take longer to load because of the way they fetch photo's videos and other page elements.

Some things that will slow your website down are:

• Incorrect coding, error codes or warnings codes, you can use a various tools to validate or check these such as http://validator.w3.org/
  
• Old and redundant html code, as above this tool will tell you what is no longer used and you may also be able to find some newer and faster coding.
• Inline styles (this coding should be located in your CSS file),
• Large image files, images that are not sized properly ( to fit the space ) are specifically slow. Some web applications may come with unsized PNG Files. Resize all images to the size that is needed and if possible convert to JPG which may be smaller in some cases.
  
• Too many large images, Make sure you are using jpg files as these are generally smaller than png (but may lack the quality), stay away from large background images!.Sometimes people accidentally have a background image behind the actual page design that will slow down the rendering of the page
  
• Too many CSS Files, You generally only need one or two CSS files unless you have substantial style changes throughout your website or are offering varied formats across different platforms (a print.css file is specifically liked by google for SEO purposes). Additionally many CSS File templates include text (generally indicating what it is) which is not needed or actual styling options that are not being used. These can all be trimmed to make it run much faster.
  
• Optimise your CSS File - Be careful when using external CSS resources, You can use some as inline styles in your html if they are quite small, Condense duplicate Style properties.
• Don't use Flash - Flash is slow and too much fancy stuff will make things even slower, like fancy moving images and transitional slideshows.
• Don't use Frames - Some web designs use frames try to avoid where possible,
• Nested Tables Do not use too many or try not to use any Nested Tables,
• Javascript - Again don't use too much javascript on one page and incorrect javascript can seriously slow your website down. There are things you can also do to make sure it loads faster and last, But having widgets that have a lot of JSquery will add to your websites usability and also ranking.
• Video Files - As long as you have the video files set so people can click on them if they want to play this will help - but google likes videos and removing a video may have the opposite effect.
• CMS Systems - Some content management systems are notoriously slow, however they may have some widgets that will help with cache of your site.
• Don't forget about Mobile optimisation - you should try to make sure your website is as slick and smooth on a mobile or tablet devices too. A  Meta Viewport tag is good for enabling suitable viewing across web devices. However it maybe better to have a separate mobile site and or Css file.
• File Compression - To speed up your website further you can of course compress many of your files with Gzip to make them smaller, but if you already have a small CSS or HTML Files this does not always work and you may not find any benefits.
• Trim down HTML - Again cut out any HTML that is not needed if you have inline styles on each page, remove these and use once in your CSS File, rather than repeating the same styling options on every page,
• Finally -This may sound like you will be removing a lot from your website to achieve faster loading time but with the latest round of web designs out there, less is actually more.

Conclusion
There are many additions you can add to your website that may be adding much needed elements that google actually likes to see. Whilst these may also be slowing down your web page they are not always bad. Play around with these by adding and removing them and see how much difference they actually represent in terms of SEO and ranking.

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WEBSITE SPEED CHECKING TOOLS

Here are a couple of tools that will help you decide if it's your website's speed that is holding you back. But be carefull some speed tests are simply wrong and are analysing different things

http://www.webpagetest.org/ This is a really good tool, as it will tell you which individual elements are taking time to load, so you can really narrow down what the potential speed issues are.

FOR SPECIFIC WAYS ON HOW TO SPEED UP WEEBLY  WEBSITE- 
SEE WEEBLY OPTIMISATION TIPS

Google Webmaster Tool is pretty good too
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed
And will give you some very useful advice and tips
67 / 100 
Suggestions Summary
Should Fix: 
Enable compression - Show how to fix
Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content - Show how to fix
Consider Fixing:Leverage browser caching Show how to fix
Minify JavaScript - Show how to fix
Optimize images - Show how to fix
Minify HTML - Show how to fix
Minify CSS - how how to fix
3 Passed Rules - Show details


NEXT: HOW TO CHOOSE A GOOD DOMAIN NAME

IT'S ALL IN THE SPEED of your website

What is a good website Speed?

A GOOD WEBSITE SPEED IS UNDER 0.70 sec

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​As a SEO consultant in London I carry out consultancy work for individuals, sole traders, small companies and large businesses.  Providing specialist SEO advice on several different levels in and around London. We help start up businesses, new businesses and established companies.

So what can an SEO Consultant do for you or your company?

• Provide unbiased behind the scene technical advice on new an exisiting websites,
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Does the speed of my website matter?

Speed up my website

mobile optimisation

SPEED UP IMAGE DELIVERY

Another fantastic option to speed up a website is to use a content delivery network (CDN) to speed up the delivery of some of your files to your website.

WHAT IS CDN and HOW CAN THIS HELP SPEED UP MY WEBSITE?

CDN delivers fast, efficient, and secure delivery of content to websites and  allows for the quick transfer of website assets needed for the loading of page content, including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.

​In simple terms a CDN acts as another server. When a website and page is rendered all the files and content that show up in a web browser are pulled from one server that hosts your website, and that server is limited by its bandwidth, it can only deliver those files needed to make up the page one at a time. Imagine if you have two or perhaps three servers doing this?

In some instances we are already doing this, perhaps without even knowing it. A good example would be If you embed Youtube videos into your website. The video is hosted elsehwere on a different server and when played the video is being played from that server, i.e. YouTube. 

Now you can do this with lots of web elements, however I tend to do this with my largest and slowest files (if needed). Which usally is my images.

One of the most popular solutions is Cloudflare but one of the free options I use is SIRV which specialises in image delivery. You simply upload your image into SIrv and then copy the code and paste the code into your website where you want your image to appear.

By rendering some or all of your images from another server can really speed up page load times. And you can even lazy load images so that they only load if the user scrolls to that section of the page. This is why I tend to use Image CDN for my footer images. The Picture frame image above is delovered using CDN.

WEBSITE FUNDAMENTALS

Websites are coded using these 4 main programming languages and are essential in building a website and can have significant effects on SEO including website page load speeds and functionality.

HTML

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the standard markup language for creating Web pages. HTML describes the structure of a Web page including content and elements within a page.
​

CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and can help save 
CSS saves a lot of work of work and time when it comes to building a website. CSS controls the layout and style of multiple web pages all at once.

PHP

PHP Hyper Text Markup Language is a server scripting language, and a powerful tool for making dynamic and interactive Web pages. PHP is a widely-used, free, and alternative to Microsoft's ASP.
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JS

JS stands for JavaScript  and enables you to create dynamically updating content, control multimedia, animate and images. It's very useful at making website fun, user responsive and interactive.

WE SEO FROM THE CODING UPWARDS