5 tips to speed up your website in 2022

Post originally published on the Yellow Door blog.

There’s nothing worse than a slow website, even for the most patient people! It’s become so important to user experience that all major search engines will penalise your rankings if your site speed is not up to scratch. The good news is that there is no reason that your website can’t be fast to load and easy to navigate with all the tools available on the market.?

Here are 5 tips to speed up your website, or build a new one if your current one isn’t working for you.

1. Build the website on?WordPress with Elementor Pro

At Yellow Door Collective, we build all of our websites on WordPress, not only because it is the?world’s most popular content-management software, but also because when combined with the Elementor Pro plugin it becomes a very powerful tool to create fast, custom-designed websites. Elementor Pro is easy to use, lightweight and can be used with just a very basic theme. In fact, it can become the theme itself and allows for switching and updating of WordPress themes without having to change the layout or design of the website. This means that you avoid the issue of themes becoming outdated.

2. Compress all images before uploading

It’s a simple step but one which can save a lot of server space and loading speed. There are online tools such as tinyjpg.com which allow bulk uploads of images to be compressed. If you’re organised with the images you want to use on your website, you can save them into folders for the agency or developer and rename them to include keywords, which is great for search engine optimisation as well. You can also use a plugin to change your images to .webp which will speed up their loading time as well.

3. Use a caching plugin

With WordPress, the options for extra plugins are endless, which means there are always plenty of choices including free plugins which are very well regarded. A caching plugin is a must to help speed up your site loading time. You can use one which has a ‘lazy loading’ feature as well which means that content is only loaded once you scroll down the page, and this improves the performance of the website on the whole. The other feature to look for is to ‘minify CSS’ which compresses the code that styles your website design and makes the site load faster.?

4. Upload videos to YouTube or Vimeo to embed them

According to?Oberlo, 54% of consumers want to see more video from the brands or businesses they support. But hosting a video on your website can take its toll on the loading speed. The best way to have video on your website is to upload it to a video sharing site such as YouTube or Vimeo and then embed it in your website with a shortcode. With Elementor, you just need the link to the video and you can customise how it looks so that your users won’t even know it’s not hosted on your website. You save server space and the video will likely load quicker as well.?

5.?Hosting

We’ve mentioned ‘server space’ a lot and this is part of hosting a website. You pay a monthly or annual fee to a hosting provider, which allows you a certain amount of space on their server. You can learn more about website terms in our?technical glossary. Hosting prices are quite competitive, which means that you can shop around and make sure that you’ve got the best possible hosting package for your needs. Things to consider are:

• Where the server is based, you want it to be as close as possible to your user base;?
• How much space on the server you need, i.e. if you have a large website with lots of pages and content then you’ll need more space or your site speed will be slower; and?
• The server options such as PHP memory limit, as you’ll need it to be at least 256MB or more to run Elementor Pro efficiently.?

So now you have a few tips to speed up your website if you already have one, or what to consider if you want to build a new one that is fast and easily accessible. If you’re interested in creating a new website,?get in touch. We have plenty of experience building fast, well-designed, responsive?websites.