5 Ways to Optimize Your Website

Basics for your website

I’m excited to share a post by Jenn McGroary. Jenn simplifies online marketing & website development for service-based, mom entrepreneurs. Taking the stress out of online & website marketing allows them to save time & money to reach their ideal clients & fill their pipeline so they can start loving their business again!

She is also the author of: Online Marketing Simplified: The Beginner’s Guide to Using the Internet to Market Your Local Business. When she’s not busy working, she enjoys reading, riding horses & playing with her 3 boys.

Connect with Jenn on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Thanks so much Jenn for sharing your insights with us! Read on to learn and become inspired!

No one wants to wait forever for a website to load. The consensus is you generally have 3-5 seconds to capture your visitors’ attention, so you’ll want to make sure your site loads quickly for them.

Let’s look at 5 ways you can optimize your website to speed up load time and keep things running as fast as possible.

1. Resize or Optimize your images

Unless you need to feature really detailed work, most of the images you use on your website don’t need to be a high resolution.

Since monitors don’t register images over 72dpi, it’s overkill to keep your images at a high 300dpi resolution that would be needed for print materials. All it does online is increase the size of your image file and it takes a long time to download for your users.

Many photo editing programs will have a setting called “save for the web” which compresses the image to use online without sacrificing quality.

To optimize images that are already loaded into your website, you can use a plugin called WP Smush for WordPress websites.

2. Keep plugins/scripts to a minimum

If you’re using a Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress, you don’t want to clutter things up in the backend.

Adding a lot of extra plugins can add needed functionality, however they also slow your site down. Review your needs and try to pare down any unnecessary scripts. Many times, some functionality can be hard coded into your site to eliminate the need for plugins.

Deactivate any that are unneeded and make sure you delete inactive plugins. Even if they aren’t activated, many still load scripts every time your site loads, slowing it down.

3. Clean up your database

One of the best things about WordPress is that is has a revision control, meaning if you make a mistake or want to revert back to an earlier version of the page, it keeps copies of those in the database. The bad thing is that it can take up some serious room.

Although this is a great feature to have, they, along with old comment spam, extra drafts, and trash can clutter up your database, slowing load times. These should be cleaned out regularly.

You can use a plugin called WP-Optimize to help you clean these up.

4. Use a Caching system

Web caching is temporarily storing your website files, images, and scripts in such a way so that they take a shorter time to load for your visitors.

By using a caching plugin, such as W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket, your pages, scripts, and files will be optimized to load faster rather than be pulled separately from each of the database areas, thus speeding up your page load time.

5. Use a good hosting company

Inexpensive, shared hosting is great when you’re just starting out and trying to keep to a budget, however as your site grows and your traffic increases, you may outgrow that starter plan. A good, reputable hosting company makes sure to balance resources for their clients and keeps their sites running fast and efficiently.

You will pay a little more for this, however it is worth it if you rely on your website for your business.

Bonus:

Test your site to see how well optimized it is by going to GTMetrix. There, you’ll get a list of different things you can do to help your site run faster than ever. 🙂

[Tweet “Is your #website slowing you down? These 5 tips will help! #seo”]

Sanity Assignment

Take a few minutes to review these five basics for your website:

• How are you doing?
• Where are the areas for most improvement right now?
• What is one action item you’ll take today to help you optimize your website?

We’d love to know! Please comment below.

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Thank you so much Jenn! These website basics are great for us Mompreneurs!

To contact Jenn directly, you may find her at http://jennmcgroary.com/