5 recommendations to speed up loading of your website and optimize server usage

Even that is becoming less common, some even hosting transfer-set limits of bandwidth consumption, which can eventually leave our web site out of service. Besides this, it is also necessary to keep server performance and optimize our sites to load quickly, something that users will greatly appreciate our visitors.

A site that loads slowly is seen immediately, and the chances that a user upset about this situation back to visit are greatly reduced. Fortunately, there are some very simple steps we can take to keep these situations under control.

Optimizing images

The images on websites are often the main reason that these are slow to load. There are some tools that allow us to optimize images so that we can reduce weight without losing much quality.

For example, Photoshop has a specific option for this and can be found by clicking "File" then "Save for web and devices." This option will allow us to choose the format and quality with which we want to save the image, find a good weight / quality is not very difficult and the results are worth the few extra clicks.

An alternative to Photoshop, is Smush.it , a tool that lets you compress and optimize images of these bytes by removing unnecessary information without affecting its quality. Beyond this option to reduce the image size manually can be a good solution for specific cases.

CSS instead of images

Create rounded corners, shadows and gradient backgrounds are some examples of things that used to be using images, but now you can get the same results with a few simple lines of CSS code, saving a few KB at the end of the process.

To help with this you can use some of the tools to generate CSS code to present days earlier in another of our articles.

Compress JavaScript and CSS files

Minify is a useful and powerful tool that will help us reduce the weight of CSS and JavaScript files that make up our web site, eliminating white space and unnecessary comments, and then compress everything using gzip.

This procedure not only reduces the weight of the files, but also reduces the number of calls made by the client to the server to request the files. No doubt an indispensable tool, which also recommend that you spend a few minutes learning to maximize their profits.

Using alternative storage services

If your website offer downloading heavy files, you should consider storing them in places other than your own server, because each will affect the discharge of bandwidth limit set by your hosting service.

The larger sites and more traffic using Content Distribution Networks or CDN-by-Content Delivery Network to precisely guarantee and secure content distribution. This option can be expensive, but there are free alternatives that can be considered, especially if it is a small site or a personal blog.

Use Dropbox as the source of the CSS files, JavaScript and images of our site may be a way to improvise a CDN, but not recommended for large sites or in heavy traffic, and that Dropbox has a limit of 10 GB for each day. There is also an infinite number of services to host and share large files for free.

Using. Htaccess

With files. Htaccess in Apache server configurations can be established to prevent hotlinking, as well as implement a method to store cached files are not updated regularly.

The codes needed to implement these settings you can find them in a post we published recently, along with another group of useful codes. htaccess

Finally, it is recommended to measure the speed of loading web sites before and after making changes, in order to make comparisons and decide whether to make further adjustments and identify other potential problems.