How to Improve Your Website Speed

Increase Website Speed

As attention spans grow shorter with people who use the internet, it’s important to have a website that loads fast. This ensures that customers will not become impatient and click away. At 445 Media, we make sure that your website speed is up to par by focusing on these three important factors:

Reducing Plugins

While plugins offer advantages to the operation of a website by making certain tasks easier, they can also slow down a site. If a plugin really isn’t needed, it’s best to not have it installed and activated. We also believe in removing any plugins that have been installed in the past but offer no real advantages in the present. Outdated plugins will not only slow down the speed of a computer, but they are also easy prey for hackers.

Optimize All Images

The images on a website play a huge role in how fast a site loads. Three important factors to consider include the format, size and src attribute of each image.

– Format: When possible, we use JPEG format as it loads fast. A close second is PNG.  Although, some older browsers have trouble supporting this format. We avoid using GIFs, BMPs and TIFFs as their file sizes take a considerable amount of time to load.

– Size: It is important to keep the image size as small as possible when uploading to a site. When working with a page that is 600 pixels wide, we don’t upload an image that’s 1500 pixels and downsize the width. Instead, it’s better to upload an image that 600 pixels in length. This eliminates the time that it takes to convert that image.

– SRC Attribute: It’s also imperative that correct code is used for each image. We double-check our source URLs to ensure that they are correct. This helps save time as clean code runs faster.

Simplifying the Design

When a website is downloaded for the browser of a user, about 80 percent of the time is spent on the images, scripts and stylesheets. For each of these separate elements, an HTTP request must be made. We create code and designs that are simple and sleek. This helps reduce the amount of time that it takes to download a site as fewer HTTP requests are made. These factors are always considered when designing a site:

– Utilize CSS in place of images
– Organize separate stylesheets into one central stylesheet
– Use a low amount of scripts and keep them at the end of the code so that design and visual elements load first.

By focusing on these three factors, it helps increase the speed that a site loads. It also ensures that a website doesn’t miss out on any visitors after sound SEO tactics have been implemented.  For further technical aspects of speeding up your site for desktop and mobile devices, contact 445 Media for help!


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