Best way to speed up your website is to think and design with green initiatives: Conserve and resuse. The following are suggestions about how to load web pages faster:

Run a tight ship

Conserve by reducing waste in your html – keep things tight and short. Dont load up large images just to resize them on the browser as thumbnails. Total waste of bandwidth as well as browser-side computing. Also don’t waste server resources by having missing files. 404 errors are server-side expensive as well as an eye-sore.

Reuse code

Reuse code by making javascript and CSS external. Instead of having duplicate content loaded inline for each page, have common components as external files. This way browsers can cache them better. And don’t forget server-side caching modules. These days, a lot of sites use either Drupal, Joomla or WordPress as a CMS. This makes it dead easy to deploy a sever side caching plugin.

Render ASAP

Another technique is progressive loading (content is rendered as soon as its downloaded by the browser.) This can be appreciated the most when browsing on a slow connection (i.e. phone.) To benefit from this, I recommend placing stylesheets at the top, inside the document head.

Flush it!

Speaking of document head, its also a good idea to flush PHP write buffers after the document head. This means that partial page is spit out by the buffer while the back-end is still stitching the pages together. Makes for a faster page loading experience.

Cool tools

There are a number of tools that can help you analyze and optmize your page performance. Start off by reading this cool piece on page optimization. Then I’d recommend using this free tool to check out your page performance. Remember this is just an automation tool so take its hints with a grain of salt.

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Zaki Usman

Hello, I'm the founder and CEO at ShoutEx. I like to blog about marketing, mobile and web topics. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.