3 hacks to improve your website speed
Improving your website load time is an ongoing journey that pretty much never ends. But we get it – sometimes you just want some fast and simple tips that are proven to work, without requiring you to get a degree in web development.
Well, you’re in luck.
We recently stumbled upon a great list of “hacks” for making your site load at lightning speed. Most are not overly technical or complicated, which is why “hacks” is an appropriate term here. They’re DIY-ready.
Here are some of our favorites:
1) Get rid of unneeded plugins
They’re only slowing you down!
We’ve seen some plugins as simple as Facebook like buttons, yet they add more than 700 KB to the overall page weight. That kind of bloat is outrageous and totally unnecessary.
Go through your plugin list and get rid of anything you don’t need. Delete deactivated plugins (yes, those can hurt load speed too, even when deactivated). Make sure any active plugins are up to date and well rated for their purpose (search for better ones).
2) Take it easy with 301 redirects
This one is tricky. Because, in general, 301 redirects are good – for SEO and user experience. They help to ensure that users don’t reach dead pages (404 not found) and it redirects them instead to the appropriate pages.
But … those redirects add to the load time. Maybe only a little, but it still adds up.
The best strategy is to approach your site with more care and caution when adding new pages and creating URLs, so that you never have to worry about changing structure or using redirects at all.
3) Embed videos, don’t host
You’d be surprised at how many websites are still manually uploading large videos to their websites and using HTML code to launch the players.
Why?
99% of the time, it’s way faster and easier to embed videos that are hosted externally, on sites like YouTube or Vimeo. Your pages will load a hundred times faster, and chances are your videos perform better too.
