Site Speed Optimisation Checklist
Website site speed and page load times are extremely important.
Slow loading times can lead to high bounce rates, low user engagement, and bad search engine rankings.
This checklist includes some essential steps that you can take to enhance your website’s performance, such as optimizing images, minimizing HTTP requests, enabling caching, using a content delivery network (CDN), and more.
Website Speed Improvement Checklist
- Use GTMetrix and Pagespeed Insights to test your website loading performance
- Make sure all requests are sent via HTTPS (not HTTP)
- Host your website on a dedicated server with a SSD (Solid State Drive)
- Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network). A few good options are:
- Serve all static files either from a static subdomain or CDN
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
- Remove all unnecessary redirects
- Remove unused CSS, you can use the Chrome Developer Tools to find unused CSS
- Minify HTML, CSS and JS. There are several open-source tools available for this:
- Minify HTML with HTMLMinifier
- Minify CSS with CSSNano or csso
- Minify JavaScript with UglifyJS or Closure Compiler
- Enable Gzip/Brotli file compression to reduce file sizes
- Properly size all images before uploading, instead of using HTML and CSS to resize them
- Don’t overcomplicate your site architecture. Google crawlers should be able to find every single one of your web pages in a maximum of three clicks
- Don’t overdo it with WordPress plugins, that might slow your site down. Deactivate any unused plugins
WordPress Site Speed Plugins
If you’re using WordPress, most of the above can be achieved by using the following plugins: