Tips to help improve website performance

There are thousands of different ways to boost website performance. Today I would like to emphasise the key methods of achieving higher performance. There are three key areas when looking at the performance of your website. Firstly, the hardware, more commonly referred to as your “web server”.

Depending on your website specification and requirements, looking into quicker web server hardware could lower processing bottlenecks. Secondly, server side scripting language and the way the script is programmed plays a very important role when performance is considered an issue. Last but not least, the front-end, such as CSS and images, plays a part.

Image formats
If a lot of images are used throughout the website it is important to understand format differences. If the image has high colour depth, such as digital photography, then a JPEG should be adopted. If images are solid colours, for instance bar charts, PNG and GIF file types are required, but there are pros and cons of both formats in terms of usage.

CSS and JavaScript
Bytes of data can be reduced if attributes within CSS are reduced to one line per class/Id. This will reduce unneeded characters such as tabs and white space. There are also tools available that will check your CSS file for duplication of class names and IDs. In some cases developers may declare class names multiples times for no reason, increasing the CSS document size.

Simon Whiston
Natural SEO Programmer