In an ever-advancing world of website technology, the only thing that truly matters is your ability to test Google speed. Network providers to digital real estate services are all laser-focused on offering speed as their prime selling feature. It goes without saying that developers overlook the speed factor and focus more on functionality. This is outright wrong. Building a fast website is as important as building a beautiful one.
What people don’t know is that there are tools available that help immensely in boosting a website’s speed without compromising the functionality part. So if you are looking to boost your website speed then below are a few tools that will come in handy. If you are looking to first build your brand via marketing channels, then consider reading our 2020 Digital Marketing Trends first.
Get a Website Analysis Tool to Test Google Speed
If you want to speed up your website then first you need to find out what are the problems that are slowing your website down. In such cases, tools like Pingdom can be really helpful. Pingdom apart from being a free website scoring tool examines every component of your web page, it provides you with the statistical analysis of the site and gives tips to increase your website’s performance speed.
GTmetrix is another good performance measuring and analysis tool which provides you with graphs and statics. It also measures the site’s performance on mobile devices and rates the issues according to priority.
Use CSS Sprite Generators
Images are a key part of any website. The more images your website contains the more HTTP requests a browser has to send to retrieve them all thereby increasing the loading time. One way to boost up is to use tools like SpriteMe which compresses several to all images into a single file, which significantly reduces the number of HTTP requests making your site fast to load. SpriteMe can generate a CSS sprite in just one click. Another such tool is Compass, you can use either of them.
Integrate Caching Plugins
Caching any website is the best way to boost your website’s performance and speed. WordPress provides a wide range of plugins for cashing the site, these plugins can be easily installed on your WordPress websites. W3 Total Cache is the best plugin available which increases server performance, reduces the download time, and improves the overall user experience.
Setup a Content Delivery Network to Test Google Speed
Now instead of hosting your sit on a single server, what you can do is host your website on a network of worldwide servers. This ensures fast delivery of web files along with multimedia elements like images and videos which enable the web browsers to download these files and load the web page faster. CDN is especially important for business with a global reach that generates website traffic from around the world. CacheFly and MaxCDN are two of the best CDN’s available in the market.
CDN’s aside from boosting the website’s performance and increasing its speed also provides protections against threats like DDoS attacks, website crawlers, and spams.
Start CSS and Javascript Compression
Downsizing your code and scripts is another way to optimize the speed and performance of your website. Compressing your website’s code reduces the time required to download parse and load your website. There are many CSS and Javascript compressors available which will minimize your code in just one click and provides you with the speed and functionality that you desire. CleanCSS is a CSS compressor that many good developers vouch for and for Javascript there is JSCompressor available. If you are looking for a server-side compressor then Minify is a good choice. It is a PHP application that combines multiple CSS and Javascript files and removes unwanted spacing and comments.
These were a few tools in a list of many that can increase the performance and speed of your website. There are many more tools out there to help you, so be sure to use them the next time you are developing a website as these tools drastically increase the performance because at the end of the day providing a good user experience is what matters for your website to grow.
