Speed is important for any serious business wanting to ensure they provide the best online experience. If you want to excel, your website, the front man who is always there, needs to be fast, for everybody, all the time. If a page takes too long to load, people won’t think twice about abandoning it.
Front End Optimization is actually a thing. There is a specific check list of items you can look at. A list of errors and then simply apply the fixes to each item affecting your website speed issues. Website speed issues and poor YSlow scores often have little to do with your hosting plans robustness.
Front end performance deals with all the things involving how your website renders and displays on your visitors devices. The majority of the offending issues are actually pretty standard.
For illustration purposes we used our website. Recently we made some changes and noticed that our performance grade was way below average. Not good for a digital marketing business. So we need to fix this fast, but it also was a great opportunity to document, a before and an after; to actually highlight what we can do to help make your website go faster. So lets get to it .
The first image shows our before grades.
We pay for a top notch hosting plan, why is my site showing F grades for YSlow? First you have to understand that YSlow grade is more about your site showing up fast and displaying correctly on a users device.
A low YSlow means your site is not just popping up and displaying correctly, something is going on delaying the rendering, probably making people think your site is slow, stalling, and non responsive. This is especially bad when a first time visitor experiences it; most likely ending in a bounced visit. A slow page speed score gives a bad first impression. I needed to get this fixed fast.
Bad grades are highlighted in Red and Orange. Looks like we have some work to do.
Our page speed has lots of issues too. Bad grades all the way around; D C and F’s . If you have something that looks like this don’t worry. Your sites issues can be resolved with out fanfare.
To Improve WordPress Website Speed first go to a web performance grader check your speed, get an assessment and verify any possible issues. Try these free online speed tests: Web Page Test, Page Speed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom Tools.
We succeeded by working on the following. With plug ins, know how and 28 minutes we addressed the following:
Ads Expires Headers – Extend the time frame specific files or even file types are kept and reused.
Reduce HTTPS Requests – Remove uneeded plugins, themes, tools, and unused data files.
Defer parsing of Javascript – Speeds up the above fold content while delaying the script until the html is downloaded.
Reduce DNS Look ups – DNS lookups add delays to the initial requests to a host. Too many requests to different hosts can hurt performance.
Minify JS and Cache – Remove all unnecessary characters from HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.
Minimize Redirects – Combine multiple javascript files, styles sheets and external backgrounds with CSS sprites.
Leverage Browser Caching – After implementing a user’s browser will download less data while navigating through your pages, which will improve the loading speed of your website.
Optimized All Images -We compressed and re sized every image to exact specifications.
CDN– Content delivery network, service that utilizes a global array of servers. Serving your website from multipule servers that are physically closer to the end user. Speeds delivery up big time.
With a little attention to the specific issues we were able to reverse the poor performance in about 28 minutes.
If you need your website performance fixed, or want a second look just give us a call. 916-450-1335
Peerless Digital Marketing creates integrated web presence strategies. Multi-screen strategies that help businesses engage with potential customers at the right time and place in the online world. Call Ryan Today 916-450-1335.
Specialties: Internet Marketing & Digital Media Strategy | Google Adwords Certified | PPC | Google Analytics | Merchant Accounts | Programmatic DSP Display | Ad Trafficking | Social Ads| Video Ads | Email Marketing | Web Site Conversion Strategies | Adobe Creative Suite | Word Press | Yelp | Data- Aggregators & Listings | Phone Tracking| Mobile App | Geo-Fence | IP Targeting | Live Chat Technologies | YouTube Video | iHeart, Pandora & Spotify