What is my website’s speed?
There are several tools you can use to tell you your page speed performance scores and speeds, but more importantly they often tell you what you’re doing wrong and what needs fixing! We use GTMetrix.com to check website speed and performance of our sites. Another great one is Page Speed Insights by Google. This is a great tool as it provides an overview of your site loading time with a detailed guide on how to improve it.
Tools like these often return a fairly substantial list of quite technical things to improve on your site.
Here is a summary of some more simple things to keep an eye on for your own website to get you started…
Server Speed
Firstly, your choice of web host provider is paramount to the loading speed of your site. Smaller sites tend to go for cheaper web hosting options meaning they share servers with other external sites; there’s nothing wrong with this but it can impact your overall speed if one of those sites receive a lot of traffic. If you yourself have a large database it can affect your website speed so hosting your site on a private server might be a better option for you. The team at the Hideout can advise on the best hosting options for you.
How large is your content?
If you’re uploading anything to your website, whether that’s visual content like images, photos, infographics or downloadable documents, it’s important to make sure these files are the correct, optimised size.
Good practice for your website’s content is compressing and reducing the size of the images files you upload. There are many tools out there that do this – a particular fave of ours is TinyPNG.
Doing this doesn’t necessarily have to reduce the quality of the images but your page load speed will thank you! Again, things like videos or audio files are often large size formats so it’s not a good idea to upload straight onto your site. Embed them on to your page once they’ve been uploaded somewhere else (youtube/soundcloud)
CMS & Plugins
Updating to the latest version of the CMS prevents your site from slowing down. It’s also a recommended security practice because it protects your site from vulnerabilities. If you’re adding poorly coded plugins this will definitely have a negative impact on your page speed. We advise against this. If you’re looking at integrating a particular functionality to your site, let us know! We will be able to advise you, we only recommend and install plugins that are actively being maintained, supported and can be relied upon. Otherwise we build the functionality ourselves.
