By making some minor changes to your website, you can seriously increase your website performance. This means faster load times for your visitors improving their experience. It could also mean a lighter load on your servers meaning fewer resources are needed potentially saving you money. Google also says site speed is a factor in their page ranking so a faster site could help increase your traffic!
Most of the tips revolve around shrinking the content size. The smaller the files, the quicker they are to send and the less space they take up.
WebP is a Google developed image format that offers better compression than JPEG, same image quality but smaller files. The main issue used to be browser support but this is no longer a problem. Always go from a lossless copy of an image to WebP, converting from JPG to WebP will mean a loss in quality!
WebP has a lossless mode which makes it good for non-photographic elements such as charts and other site graphics. The file size of a lossless WebP image is usually smaller than that of an optimised PNG file.
If you do need to stick to using PNG files, maybe for compatibility reasons, there are various optimisers that do a better job of compressing them. I use OptiPng on the PNG images on this site and it can result in 50%+ smaller files!
Click to read more about the pros and cons of the various image formats.
JavaScript can be great for dynamic content but over use can make a website much slower. This slowness can be from downloading large JavaScript files and from the user's device struggling to actually running it. Other problems can be compatibility issues and users maybe blocking JavaScript entirely.
There are various tools such as Google's Closure compiler that can reduce the size of JavaScript files which can help reduce download times. It reduced some of the, already small, files on this site by around a third!
The following are more advance ideas, however the above should be looked at first though or they may not be as effective.
If your site has a lot of dynamic content (such as PHP/ASP pages) the pages get built every time they are requested. Caching keeps copies of pages that have been built and serves them when possible. WordPress has various options and plugins for this.
If your web server (such as Apache or IIS) has compression enabled, it means pages (e.g. html) get sent as compressed files rather that uncompressed text. This is handled transparently by the browser and means much smaller files are sent.
Companies such as Cloudflare can mirror your website in various locations around the world meaning it is closer to your users. Once set up your users will not notice any difference. A CDN like Cloudflare can also help protect your website from attacks. For smaller sites, Cloudflare's free tier may be enough.
Depending on your website content, there are many platforms such as Google Sites and WordPress.com which offer some of the above automatically meaning you can concentrate more on your website content. Google Sites is free and WordPress offers a free plan.
Created
(18/04/2025)