Hi, this is David with Tiny Frog. I’m a web developer here to talk to you today about factors impacting the speed of your website.
Speed is very important. You want your website to pop up so fast when people go to it. Nowadays Google puts search engine factors in related to the speed of your website and they have a great tool to test the speed. So speed is very important and as software developers, we have a lot to pay attention to when it comes to delivering your website at lightning-fast speed to your visitors.
The number one thing we can do is write our code very efficiently to improve website speed. So if we write code we want to only have to read it through it once, we want to make it very easy for your server and your internet browser to read through it, we use a system called minification, which takes a lot of different white spaces in our code and packs it all into one block that computers can read. It’s not easy for humans to read but computers read it much faster, so we do that.
The other thing we do is we set up a lot of caching for your website. So if you have a page that’s not going to change very much we don’t have to load that from the WordPress database every single time. There are a few different places we can store that information so that we can just pop it right out when someone visits that page, that’s called a cache. We also do what’s called object caching and that is when your website needs to pull something out of a database. If it’s pulling the same thing a couple times, instead of actually running that query through the database we will just deliver the same information that that query would have returned. So that’s called object caching and that is very very important too.
Other things are image sizes – so when we develop a website, we don’t want to upload a picture that just came straight out of your digital camera because that thing is going to be giant. We want to crop it down and resize it to the exact size that it’s going to be on a computer screen or on a mobile phone so that when it arrives it takes just the exact amount of data transfer to get that image over, no extra, no less, no loss in quality, just the exact size. So we do that too. One other thing we do is we use only the graphics from CDN’s, only the icons from CDN’s that we need to. So when you’re using a font you can load it from Google, you can load it from a lot of different places that store fonts called repositories or CDN’s on the internet. And every time your website loads a page it has to talk to that other website to get that font or to get that little icon or to get whatever we’re sharing with the other third party. So what we want to do is try to only retrieve what we need from those places and there are a lot of great tools we use to do that to make sure that when we load fonts, when you load icons, that they’re very very fast in their delivery to your website.
So those are just a few of the things. I could go on and on about the different best practices for speed of your website but the bottom line is that it’s insanely important and every web developer and every business owner should be considering the speed of their website.
So if you have questions about that or are interested in speeding up your website, please contact us. This is David at Tiny Frog.
