6 Ways To Make Your Site Faster (so people will stick around and read your stuff!)

Why should you try to make your site faster? Well, for one thing people only wait TWO SECONDS for a site to load before they click away! Click through for 6 tips on what to delete, what to back up, and which plugin to install! >> yesandyes.org
Did you know the average internet user will only wait TWO SECONDS for a page to load? While that might seem unduly harsh, most of us know the pain of the buffering circle and few of us are willing to wait for our cat videos.

When I’m working with clients, one of the most common things I find myself saying is “It might be my computer or my connection but your site seems really slow. I’d suggest checking it on a few different devices and IPs and then, uh, edit accordingly.”

In case you can’t tell, “edit accordingly” means “I don’t really know how you can make your site faster but it’s definitely important maybe Google it?”

Enter: Anouska Rood. Anouska builds gorgeous, custom sites that help people grow their list, make more money, and find more freedom. So when she offered to tell you guys how to speed up your site I was all over it. Read on!


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6 Comments

  1. Rebekah Jaunty

    Whoa, I had no idea my site was so slow. I’m going to spend an hour or two tackling this mess today. Thank you both for the enlightenment, ladies!

    • Sarah Von Bargen

      Crazy, right?!

  2. Rebecca Catterall

    Wow – bit scary adding the revision code to my config file – but figured it out with baby steps. All working beautifully.

    WP Optimise took me from 17.5 to 6.2MB! Fabulous 🙂

    Images settings rejigged. 😀

    The Google Page insights scored me a lowly 24/100 for mobile (98 for user experience though!) and 20/100 for computer before tweaks – and after was – oh.. the same. 🙁

    So I need to work on several other things – including optimising images, ‘Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content’ (what does that even mean?), Reduce server response time… ahhh it’s like reading Welsh to me!

    I shall go have a play – thanks for the prompt to get me started. 🙂

    • Anouska

      I’m glad you got started!

      24/100 – ouch. The tweaks I wrote about will usually help in getting that score up, but those are not always the main or only cause of a slow website. Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow will tell you exactly why your website is slow.

      Google PageSpeed Insights (and YSlow too!) can get confusing fast if you’re not code-savvy. ‘Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content’ means to stop code from loading when the page loads, if it’s not actually used in the above-the-fold content (which is what you see when you first open the page, so the very top of the page). This can only be done by editing code or getting a better theme, unfortunately.

      ‘Reduce server response time’ is something I usually see with low-budget shared servers, like I mentioned at the end of the blog post. This too will be hard to fix without moving to a new host.

      But I think you should be able to improve the score by a lot even without it. Focus on optimising images, that should help a lot too. For example, your headshot is showing at 338×508 pixels (desktop) and at most 784×1176 pixels (largest tablet size) but it’s loading at the original size of the image 1365×2048 pixels – just resizing it to the actual size you need would make the file size a lot smaller and help in making your site load faster.

      If there’s anything else unclear, please ask! 🙂

      • Rebekah Jaunty

        “‘Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content’ means to stop code from loading when the page loads, if it’s not actually used in the above-the-fold content (which is what you see when you first open the page, so the very top of the page).”

        Aha! Thank you, I wasn’t sure about that.

  3. Marko Zupanic

    A very useful post. I’ve had problems with the speed of my blog in the past, but I managed to solve them by changing the hosting, and with some plugins. The speed of the site is very important, because the tardiness will make people stop visiting the blog.

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