5 Tips to improve the speed of your website or blog
Improving the loading speed of our website or blog is an important factor for both our human visitor and search engine robots, therefore improving it helps us with both.
I promised that my next article was going to be something very practical and applicable, so here are 5 tips to improve loading speed:
1) Good Hosting: Although it seems very basic, it is a point that is worth touching, if we have a small website with few visits per day there is no problem with using shared servers, but if we have a popular site with a good volume of traffic the best is a server dedicated.
2) Know when to use gif, jpg or png: Playing with the different image formats makes their sizes vary considerably.
It is advisable to use the GIF format when it comes to logos, favicons, text, etc. They do not require the use of many colors, when we save a GIF file it is good to make sure that we use a small color palette.
JPG is a good format for images with many colors and details such as photographs, while PNG is a very useful format when we need transparent images of good quality.
3) More DIVs, fewer tables: Although it seems fiction, many people still use tables to layout websites.
What is the problem with the tables?
El problema es que usamos un montón de código para básicamente nada, usar «<td>» y «<tr>» por doquier no ayuda al visitante ni brinda información relevante sobre el tema de nuestra página al motor de búsqueda… por lo tanto solo estorba.
Layers (or "divs") load much faster and use less code.
Now, if we need to make a table of something, nothing better than using tables (worth the redundancy), at the end of the day they still exist for that.
4) Better encoding: Nothing helps improve the loading speed of a website than good coding, luckily most of the best CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. They come pretty well coded from the factory.
If we have to develop a site from scratch we must pay attention to our connection with the database, if we ask for information that we do not need and if our functions are really effective.
5) Cache: This is a great way to reduce the number of queries made to the server. It is simply a matter of saving a static version of the page to be displayed and that is displayed instead of the dynamic version.
If we use WordPress there is a plugin that does all that work for us, you can download it at the following link: WP Cache
While these tips are basic, they are very practical and help us improve the overall visitor and search engine experience.