Shrinking Your Site For Maximum Speed

Loading times for websites are extremely important. Customers hate slow pages, and so does Google. The loading speed of your website is one of the factors the search engine giant uses when determining where you should end up in their results. A slow website will sink like a stone to the bottom of the results.



You can speed up your website by upgrading your hosting, and that’s something you’ll sometimes have to do, but there’s another far simpler method. Make your site smaller!

Reducing the file size of the web pages that make up your website (also known as page weight) is an easy way to speed up your website. Here’s a couple of ways in which you can reduce the page weight of your website.

Make Your Images Smaller

One of the biggest contributors to the page weight of a website is images, so they’re a good place to start when looking to trim things down. There are two main ways to shrink the size of an image, reducing its dimensions, and compressing it.

Let’s talk about reducing dimensions, we don’t mean you have to make all of your images tiny. Big hero images are still allowed, so don’t panic! What we want to do is be smarter about the way images are implemented. What that means is making sure images aren’t any larger than their containers.

The container of an image is the space on the page that holds it, any extra image leftover after it has filled the container still makes weight for your site, even though no one can see it. The solution is simple, crop images to the exact dimensions required and no more.

The other thing you can do is to compress images. Image compression is a method for reducing file sizes by discarding information, and is divided into lossless and lossy compression.

Lossless compression (including .tif, .zip, .png) is reversible, but lossy compression (like .jpg and .mpeg) permanently discards the information. Reversible compression is fantastic if you expect to still have to work on a file later, but comes at the cost of a larger file size. Permanently discarding file data means lossy formats tend to come out smaller.

If your image files seem to be larger than is necessary, take a look at how they’re being compressed, chances are there’s a better way to present them.

Use Less Images

Once again, don’t panic, we’re not getting rid of your images. While a website stripped right back to plain text would undeniably be fast, it’s not a necessity. It’s again about making your site work smarter and not harder.

To explain what we’re driving at, imagine going into a cafe to order four coffees. Which would be faster, ordering all four at once, or ordering each individual coffee one at a time?

Of course, you would want them all in the same order, each extra order would just duplicate effort and slow down the process. It’s the same with images on your website. If you have a group of images all together in place, combine them.

One larger image is a lot faster for a website to load than four smaller images, contradictory as it sounds. Each new image means another request to the server and another wait for a response. Reduce loading times by combining images wherever you can.

Trim Unnecessary Plugins & Extensions

Plugins and extensions are a fantastic way to add new functionality to your website and make it easier for you, the owner, to maintain without needing constant assistance.

Of course, like images, videos, and everything else on your website, each new addition adds weight and increases load times. To combat this, don’t add additions you don’t need, and be smart about the ones you have.

If you're not going to use a plugin, don’t install it! If you have any old plugins that you have since discarded or replaced, make sure to remove the unnecessary plugins. Besides taking up space, old and abandoned plugins are a security risk to your site.

You should also keep an eye on the user reviews and general opinion of plugins you’re thinking of using, they’ll generally tell you if something is unusually heavy and point you to better options.

Be smart about what you attach to your site and you shouldn’t have any problems.

A fast website is a website that ranks highly in search results and attracts visitors in droves. Keep your site’s page weight down and its speed up!