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.

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

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