Yo, Your Website Is Slow. And, here’s what you can do about it.

It’s not news that people are spending less time than ever on websites these days. The big question you should have about visitors on your site is are they browsing or are they waiting for it to load and load and load and …

If you experiencing increasingly slow load times for your website, what are ways that your site can be sped up so your visitors can have a pleasant experience? Here are a few common issues and simple solutions:

Optimize files and images: Overloading a website with images, especially large ones, will cause serious lag. Your best bet is to delete images from your site that are not in use and pay attention to the format of the images that you use (.PNG is recommended). Do all of your file and image editing prior to loading it onto you server. And, make sure the images are as small as they can be to still deliver.

Cache: What if you were able to save bits and pieces of your website to your visitors computer so that when they returned to your site they did not have to wait for it to download? That’s the idea behind creating a cache and for the most part it is really not that difficult to do. If you’re on a WordPress site, it can be as simple as installing a plugin.

Choose your host wisely: We’ve built our very own server environments to combat this crappy hosting problems. Or, Rackspace, Media Temple, Nexcess, or Amazon Web Services are all good options as well. When shopping for the backbone of your website, be sure to ask plenty of questions so you can understand how much traffic that your page can handle.

Trash your revisions: Whether you realize it or not, every time that you create, edit and update a page, your host stores a backup of what you edited. If you have 90 revisions in the background of your website, that is a whole lot of items in the garbage that need deleted. WordPress Optimize will help you clean out the clutter and will speed up your website significantly.

Delete Spam: Since we are on the topic of emptying the trash, it is wise to take a stroll over to where your comments are managed. Whether you are using Disqus or something similar to the Akismet plugin, your spam comments will need filtered and emptied regularly.

Now, if you want to get down to the technical nitty-gritty, run a test on your site using the free tool, Site Load Test. It measures website optimization levels to instantly find reasons behind slow loading.

Those are just a few common issues and solutions. What have we missed and how have you sped up your own website?