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1. Reconsider Your PlugIns<\/h2>\nGood website performance doesn’t have to cost a fortune. There are several things you can do to improve your website’s performance that won’t cost you much. Some of these things you can do yourself and some may require a little outside help.<\/p>\n
1. Reconsider Your PlugIns<\/h2>\nPlugIns are convenient and often free. They let you add functionality to your website without having to hire a developer or learn any programming skills. But they have to be loaded separately from the rest of a web page, slowing things down.<\/p>\n
Some plugins can be replaced by native code that is often available online for free.<\/p>\n
If you can’t replace a plugin with code, you should make sure that you’re using the fastest plugin for the job. Check online reviews to find which plugins are faster than others.<\/p>\n
If you built your website with WordPress or a platform like Weebly, you can change the design of your website by changing the theme. With platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, or Weebly, you can change themes with a few clicks. Installing a new WordPress theme is more labor-intensive, but you should still be able to do it in house.<\/p>\n
Online reviews can help you select a fast theme for your website.<\/p>\n
Just like plugins, web browsers have to load images separately \u2013 and re-size them on the fly. If you upload pictures at full size, they’ll be too big. Resize them to the size you need.<\/p>\n
You may be adding excess code to your site without realizing it. If you write any copy for your site in a word processing program, don’t cut and paste directly into your site. First paste the copy into a text editor to strip out invisible formatting codes that are meaningless outside of the word processing program.<\/p>\n
If you search online for “Cheap Web Host” you’ll find a number of reviews that discuss the performance you can expect from less expensive web hosting companies. Some of the top web hosts have budget-friendly options. Make sure you’re not paying for more bandwidth than you need.<\/p>\n
Some pages and processes slow down your site more than others. Perform a load test to identify the bottlenecks and address them. Open source load testing solutions like Apache JMeter are available for free. Some commercial solutions like Dotcom-Monitor’s LoadView only charge you for the server time you actually use during a load test, making them budget-friendly.<\/p>\n
You can trim and trim, and still have large web pages (100kb or more). Using a free tool called GZip, you can set up your server to compress large files to speed things up.<\/p>\n
If you built your website with a WYSIWYG editor, the software created the code for you. This code is anything but elegant or fast-loading. The PageSpeeds Insights Chrome Extension will analyze your HTML and provide an optimized version.<\/p>\n
When you remove content from your site, you don’t always remember to remove every link to those files. When a user tries to access them, they’ll get a 404 Error that can slow down your server considerably. The Online Broken Link Checker can find your broken links for you.<\/p>\n
Every time a visitor tries to download a new page or file from your site, their browser asks for permission. By enabling Keep Alive with a snippet of code, the browser only has to ask permission once.<\/p>\n
Be sure to test your website’s speed with a free online tool like Dotcom-Monitor’s Web Page Speed Test before and after you make changes so you can see how much bang you’ve gotten for your buck.[vc_section][vc_row type=”1″ margin_top=”40″ margin_bottom=”40″ css=”.vc_custom_1509140570463{margin-bottom: 20px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_row_inner equal_height=”yes” content_placement=”middle”][vc_column_inner width=”1\/2″]