Decreasing Load Times of Your Website

<p>Most of these podcast episodes come about because sometime in the week prior, something has come up for me to spawn discussing it for everyone. This week I discovered a few client websites were still adding large images to the article posts even though they were taught to optimize them in a way that would be faster to their visitors.</p> <p><strong>What is page load time and why is it important?</strong></p> <p>Load time is the length of time it takes a web page to be downloaded from the hosting server and displayed onto the requesting web browser. It’s the duration between clicking the link and displaying the entire content in your browser.</p> <p>That number matters because we expect websites to be fast. When pages take longer than expected to load, it negatively impacts our user experience. Google and other search engines factor in loading time into how they rank your website in their search results. Faster sites appear in their search results before slower loading ones.</p> <p>So, let’s look at some ways to keep our websites loading faster.</p> <p><strong>1. Optimizing Your Images</strong></p> <p>The biggest culprit for slow sites is a large volume of unoptimized images. Full-sized images can consume a lot of bandwidth while loading. So, take time to resize your images before you upload them to any website.</p> <p>The image format that you save in can significantly determine the file size. PNG files are typically 2-4 times larger in file size than JPG files of the same dimensions.</p> <p>So, it’s always best to fully optimize your images before uploading them anywhere online.</p> <p><strong>2. Decrease Displaying Offsite RSS Feeds</strong></p> <p>RSS feeds are popular because they contain content that you may not have on your website. We highly discourage the display of off-site RSS feeds because they take visitors away from your content and sponsor advertising.</p> <p>Displaying an external RSS feed means that the web page has to load that content from where it’s getting the information from. If the serve