How can I speed up my site?
Visitors want to see your site as quickly as possible. If your site loads slowly, they might leave never to return.
You can make modifications to your site that improve performance. Some of these changes are easy to manage while others might take some time to figure out.
Here are four things you can do to speed up your site:
GZIP Compression
Smaller pages load faster, regardless of your Internet connection speed. You can make your pages smaller by compressing them with GZIP. (GZIP is only available on our Linux Hosting plans.) For more information about GZIP and our hosting, see Compressing Web Pages for Faster Load Times.
Image Sizes
If you use HTML to make large images small, a site visitor still needs to download the larger version. If you need a small image, don't use HTML to do it—shrink it in an image-editing program instead.
Scripting
You can edit to say more with less. A good programmer does the same thing with code. If the code on your site is inefficient, it impacts your site's performance. There isn't a quick fix for bloated code, but if you're using GZIP and you've reduced your image sizes, analyze your code to make your site even faster. One way to make a database-driven site faster is to use a database index to improve the speed of data retrieval.
CSS
Cascading style sheets are great for formatting the look and feel of your website. If your style sheet contains a lot of styles that aren't being used, you are forcing browsers to download things they don't need. If you're trying to maximize performance, trim your CSS files and remove anything that's unnecessary.
