9 Super Hacks to Speed up your website, Enhance User experience by 22%

9 Super Hacks to Speed up your website. We’ve learnt most the hard way & Wanna Help Shorten your journey to Great User Experience!

Okay okay, I haven’t forgotten your question Matt! I am simply savouring Pauli’s return home, going through a huge load of India Hiatus photos and living life. So the question that’s popped up lots in the last couple of weeks has been: How do we do it? How to speed up your website?

Well we shall give you our practical 9 tips, super hacks to speed up your website. Plus what the techie geeks say, for those of you who love to chomp on html code and stuff. 

Here is the deal though, a website is never ‘fast enough’. Seriously! What’s important is that you endeavor to make it super-fast for a great user experience both on PC and handhelds! You will see better traffic to your site, lower bounce rate, happier visitors, return visitors MORE SALES and higher rankings…

Did I hear organic searches, more sales…Hmm whats not to like! 

 

By the way if you don’t have a website or blog…this is not for you Sorry!

And if you do have a Website then You might like to tune in to this podcast on Brand Trust!

 

 

 

So let’s first agree that a better user experience will greatly improve your chances of getting more organic site and page traffic as well as subscribers! Yes? So why aren’t we doing it?

Because life gets in the way right…!

Well a girl’s gotta make new connections, prospect, follow up, create content promote it, cook, be a mom, supervise the cleaning, hang out, heck live…

Errrm excuse me!

 

I thought you want to live the beach lifestyle soonest? Well then lets fix that now, and speed up your website so you can get more organic visitors, generate more leads, build that list and make more sales…that beach awaits the smart worker!

So let’s get your website going faster shall we. Below are our 9 Super practical hacks to speed up your website!

By the Way you can Steal Our SEO Checklist that Got our site Ranking for 8 Posts on Google Page 1 Below!

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#1 To speed up your website: Minimize redirects. Some people create a page or blog post & publish. Then decide they don’t like the way the cat looked in that photo and the headline sucked! So they redo the whole thing…and do so for the next 3 posts…PEFECTIONITIS…hello!

While 301 redirects are good for SEO, don’t overdo it. It’s much better to fix the problem okay! We have learnt the hard way, that 301s do slow down your site a wee bit. Alex bender you helped us out there 🙂

#2 To speed up your website: Invest in decent hosting. Honestly I don’t know how many times we’re told; I got GoDaddy hosting with my domain! How about you leave domains to GoDaddy and get better hosting!

They haven’t got the fastest servers so you will have lots of site crashes and slooowww loading times.

That’s Bad for your ranking! Neither should you accept uncle Ted’s offer to host your website for $2 quid. Your site is your premium online shopfront. Invest in decent hosting services like Hostgator, Bluehost etc! We recommend HostGator! For the fastest possible setup, you’ll want one or more dedicated servers. Do Check out HostGator & Get our Discount Here!

 

#3 To speed up your website: We know you keep getting told to use it but from experience we say don’t use SSL unless you have to. Esp. if like us you aren’t taking payments directly from your site.

Do some more research if you really must go the SSL & CPU cycles way, is all we will say on this matter. Opinions differ, this is ours! 

 

#4 To speed up your website: Okay this may sound like gobbledygook, but its very simple & easy. And don’t worry simply ask your web master or designer to fix it. In fact if there’s anything you don’t understand in this post to speed up your website, Allow us to take a look and see what needs fixing.

If its slow, you might like to fix canonicalization issues. Not necessarily using rel=canonical, rather make sure every page on your site has a single address e.g. if you normally use https://juleskalpauli.com then don’t use for other pages this version https://juleskalpauli.com. They are two different sites to google bots.

Try this redirect tool to check  20+ variations of your homepage. Ensure they point to your desired URL. Using one URL consistently helps with caching performance, reduces memory usage and speeds your website load speed! Brings us to the next tip

 

#5 To speed up your website: Make sure you’ve set up caching on your server. Since we use WordPress, we recommend the W3 Total Cache plugin. If you’re using another tool, learn it and its caching capabilities. Your server does or can include caching. Unless you bought it from pygmies who used to work at the chocolate factory down the road.

 

#6 To speed up your website: Well this one is fun, how about using a caching proxy like nginx esp. for Apache users. Also you could use a server accelerator like Squid. Caching proxies and accelerators are designed to store your web server’s dynamic pages and deliver them, real fast to your audience.

We’ve visited some super fast sites. Some load like up to 3x faster with a Squid server in place…So if its on your budget, go for it! Budget tight? Check out these 10 ways to speed up your website by Crazyegg! 

 

#7 To speed up your website: Man this is a simple one yet it can be the hardest as people don’t know some simple hacks. 

Smush your images into tiny ones to keep web speed sweet. Compress images using the right file type. Use ‘lossy’ compression—JPEG for photos and images with multiple colors. Use ‘lossless’ compression—PNG or GIF—for line art and images with only a few colors!

We use Jing from Techcrunch to get perfect pixel sizes and then compress them before we upload them. We also installed a plugin called smush it above. Which keeps our images wonderfully wee without compromising the quality of view size! These will help to speed up your website too!

 

#8 To speed up your website: Now this is simple courtesy. Do unto others kinda thing. You like fast websites right? Then don’t download a 1500 pixel image for a 200px wide thumbnail on your site either? So to speed up your website and blogs do re-size your images before uploading them. Avoid using height and width as your criteria! Use Jing, Photoshop, Fireworks etc…In the same way….

 

#9 To speed up your website: Minify everything on your website. Again there are WordPress plugins for that if you use that platform. Minify your javascript, CSS, HTML. BUT save a non-minified version of everything for editing purposes.

Word of Caution: Using a server-driven, ‘on the fly’ solution could increase server overhead and Slow things even more esp. with an increase in traffic volume.

Speed up your website BONUS: As always we love to over-deliver. Gzip Compress your site its very simple & easy to do manually. Follow  installation instruction below kindly provided by Marcus Taylor SEO super geek in smashingmagazine. Or ask your webmaster to do it. Open your .htaccess file (found in the root directory on your server), and add the following code to it.

NOTE: May not work for some depending on what CDN you use).

---

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

---

Once you’ve added above code snippet to your .htaccess, test your website to see if it’s been compressed. Run it thru Gzip Compression. If it hasn’t worked remove code & seek pro help! 

And once all that is done of course clean up your database. Who lives in a dirty house? So why have a website with all kinds of trash? Unapproved comments, post revisions, trackbacks etc. clean the trash. If you use WordPress, try the WP-Optimize plugin.

Learn more techy-geekery from this techie fanatic Ian Lurie on SearchEngineLand who suggests a whopping 29 ways to speed up your website in this post.  If you are a webmaster check that your site SEO is not broken, Adam Stetzer shows you how to fix it. And of course don’t forget to use the Google Webmaster tools to help you with the simpler stuff! 

Once done and you got some pocket change, monitor your website speed using pingdom! 

 

 

 

 

For Related Resources on how to improve your users experience and speed up your website, check bottom of this post below!  

 

We hope you have got value from our post on “How to Speed up your website!” We all want some of that holy grail of Organic traffic so go speed up your website…but before you go…How about like, share and Drop your tips on how you improve your website speed below.

 

And next time Paul Shares Part 3 of his Indian Hiatus…I cant believe how amazing it was, I am green with envy and yet so proud of the man, for he deserves every good thing & a lot more…Just as you do too.

 

So Live. Learn. Love!

 

Julie Syl & Pauli Kalungi

 

 

 

 

 

 

Skype: Julie.Kalungi1
Email: julieatJuleskalpauli[dot]com

Considering Coaching? Check out our Work with Me tab and Survey where we Help People Everyday.1

 

PS: IF YOUR UPLINE DOES NOT HAVE A STEP-BY-STEP BLUEPRINT FOR ONLINE MARKETING SUCCESS, CHECK THIS OUT (UNLESS YOU ALREADY HAVE TOO MANY LEADS) – CLICK HERE FOR INSTANT ACCESS