Useful Resources for Improving Site Speed

With page load time joining the throngs of ranking factors on Google, more and more websites will need to make a concerted effort to speed things up.

Following on from my post yesterday, ‘10 Tips for Reducing Page Load Time‘, I wanted to provide a few links to potentially helpful resources – both free and premium. Obviously there are plenty of ways that you can improve your page load times, some more obvious than others, but actually implementing changes can be a struggle.

The following sites and programs should help:

Reduce Cookie Size – If you aren’t able to do this yourself or are unsure of what to do, Google Code has some more information – https://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/request.html#MinimizeCookieSize

Compress CSS and JavaScript – Yahoo provide a useful java tool, the YUI Compressor, which will clean your script to remove any white spaces and broken elements.

Clean JavaScript – If you want to get your JavaScript to load faster, you might want to try the Google-powered Closure Compiler.

Image Scaling and Optimising – You can use any offline image manipulation software – Photoshop being one – to shrink your images and lower the size of files. However, for an online tool with similar functions you might want to try (the oddly titled) https://www.gimp.org/.

Load Images as Required – If you have a number of images on your site’s pages and only want them to load as and when a visitor scrolls down, you will need to implement a little coding wizardry. To help you with this try the YUI 2: Image Loader.

HTML Cleaning – To flush out all of that dead code and update any pieces that are incorrectly written, you could try https://tidy.sourceforge.net/ or https://www.htmlvalidator.com/.

Gzip Compression – For a decent archiving tool you could do a lot worse than trying Power Archiver.

Fortunately there are plenty of tools out there to help you out and get your site up to speed, you just need to identify where your problems lie and then find the solution. These are but a small cross section of resources, but we hope they help.

For even more information and technical advice, the Yahoo Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site article is well worth a read.