Are you searching for ways to significantly increase your sites speed and performance?
If so, then you are definitely on the right track.

A site’s speed is the first thing that will determine whether a person will stay or leave your site.

Consistently slow sites, leave users frustrated hence opt for other alternatives.
What does that mean for a business? It’s bad news for business.
Fast loading sites help achieve many pageviews, good user experience and better SEO as well.

Why speed is critical to your site?

According to studies conducted from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention time has significantly reduced to 7 seconds from 12 seconds.

In other words, you have less time in convincing users to stay put.
Slow sites probably make users leave even before the whole site loads.

The load time of your site decides how fast your site can be found.
Google considers the site’s speed as an important element for site rankings.

How to check for your site’s speed?

First things first, before you learn how to put your sites speed and performance on propane, determine the load time.

How do you determine the load time?

It’s just a walk in the park, simply use performance evaluation tools such as
YSlow, Pingdom and Google PegeSpeed Insights.

Ways on how to put your sites speed and performance on propane!

1. Using Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network is a network of servers distributed all over the globe.

CDN provides the end-user with content despite their geographical positions.

CDN increases the loading speed since servers are near end users.

For instance, if a server is located in the USA, users in India don’t experience the same load time when compared to users in the USA.

Regardless of the cost, it is one of the best ways of optimizing sites speed and performance.

2. Change Your hosting option

Shared hosting is commonly used by many website owners.

The Shared hosting platform is indeed cheap and quick to host on.

Why should you shift from Shared hosting to virtual private servers or dedicated servers?

Because, they are much faster than shared servers; they don’t share the same CPU, RAM and disk space

In other words, you partially or fully own servers specifically for your website.

3. Site Images Optimization

Images play a very vital role especially in eCommerce sites, they act as an attraction point in your website.

The more the images, the more the engagement.

With good things said about images, how are they an issue?

Despite the good things said, large images usually slow down websites hence negatively influence performance.

You can reduce the size of the images by using tools that compress images and retain good quality.

Such tools include; ImageOptim, JPEGmini or Kraken.

4. Reduce the number of CSS and JavaScript files

The more the number of CSS and JavaScript files in your website, the more the https requests made when accessing specific files.

Users browser’s treat Http requests of this nature as individual cases on hence slowing down the site.

If your site contains a large number of CSS and JavaScript files, then you should consider reducing them.

If you reduce this kind of files, your site will undoubtedly increase its speed and load time.

How do you reduce this kind of files?

Simply, group your site’s CSS and JavaScript files, this helps in reducing the number of Http requests made.

Thus, increasing the overall speed and performance.

Some tools are available to aid in the file’s reduction process such as WillPeavy, Script Minifier or Grunt tools.

5. Minimize the number of plugins in your site

Plugins are useful features added on top of many websites to perform specific functions.

However, if you have installed many of them in your site, then there’s a huge problem.

Why are many plugins an issue?

Because many plugins require more resources to run them.

Some plugins may make your website vulnerable to sorority threats

Therefore, run performance tests to determine plugins responsible for slowing your website.

After that, delete unnecessary or unused plugins to enhance your site’s performance.

Additionally, make sure your website’s plugins are up to date

Last but not least, you should always avoid plugins that load lots of scripts, styles as well as generating many database queries.

6. Adopt website caching practices

Your website is definitely intended for many users, therefore, website caching is one of the ways on how to put your sites speed and performance on propane.

How does website caching practices help?

When lots of users try to access your website, the servers become loaded with lots of requests.

Therefore, servers become slower and take more time to deliver content to each user requesting.

So, website caching indeed helps in storing current versions of your website until there’s an update done.

In other words, site pages don’t provide content over and over for requests made by each user.

If you are wondering on how to achieve this, kindly, don’t move an inch.

Web caching heavily depends on the platform used to develop your website.

For example, for WordPress sites, plugins such as W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache can help you achieve that.

For websites hosted on VPS and Dedicated server, you can always set web caching on general settings.

Last but not least, for websites hosted on shared servers, website caching isn’t normally available.

7. Using Gzip Compression

Gzip compression is another effective way on how to put your sites speed and performance on propane.

This type of compression helps reduce file size; therefore, it reduces the server’s response time.

Gzip compression minimizes the image files before forwarding them to your browser.

Afterwards, your browser unzips and displays the content requested.

This method works with all types of files available on your website.

You can enable Gzip method of compression on your website in two popularly known ways

You can either write a code of lines or using a utility tool known as gzip.

8. Optimize your CMS database

If you use a database in your CMS, then you should consider optimizing it for better speeds and performances.

Many CMS require plugins to extend specific functionalities, however, these plugins require more space hence, end up slowing your websites.

For example, WordPress CMS stores data accumulated from blog posts, comments and any other information.

That said, they end up taking much of your database storage space.

However, CMSs require different approaches of optimization, for instance, for WordPress users, consider WP-Optimize plugin for optimization purposes.

9. Minimize web fonts usage

Web fonts have proven to be resourceful in web designing.

Unfortunately, they can make webpages to lag since they add more Http requests to external sources.

Therefore, using modern formats for modern websites, character sets used on the site and styles needed is recommended.

10. Minimize redirects

Website redirects are useful when loading sites, however, they create additional Http requests hence slowing down your website.

If you don’t know redirects available your website, you can always use the Screaming Fog tool to identify them.

You can minimize by using the necessary redirects or entirely removing them.

Conclusion

Nowadays, users expect websites to load within or under 3 seconds.

Otherwise, you will end up losing a lot of traffic as well as revenue generated.

The above ways on how to put your sites speed and performance on propane should perfectly help you to achieve great performance on your website.

As a result of that, your income or revenue will increase.

Lastly, the above methods are simple yet excellent in website speed and performance optimization.