ONLINE MONEY PLANET

Many of our regular readers will know that recently we switched to a new look Online Income Teacher and had a bit of a tidy up behind the scenes. Whilst there was a number of different reasons for the switch, one of the primary reasons was to improve website speed.

We all love fast websites.  In fact, with faster and faster broadband and 4G networks being rolled out, there isn’t really any excuse for having to wait for sites to load.  In fact we can all be quite impatient and navigate away from a site that doesn’t load up in about a second.

All these people navigating away from slow websites can have a pretty big impact on sales if you aren’t careful.  In fact, it was reported that Amazon were able to increase revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds of improved site speed, which is massive for a company of their size.

Search engines have been taking site speed into consideration for quite a while now, which has become a big factor in SEO these days.  This means that the faster your website is to load, the more traffic search engines are likely to send your way.  Therefore it’s in both you and your user’s best interest to speed up your website.

Here are some tips that you can use to speed up your website.

First things first, you need to know how well your site is performing before you make any changes.  This will help you asses how much of an impact the changes that you make have had on your site.

As Google is the #1 search engine in the world, I use their Google PageSpeed Tool to check how fast a site is.  It’s a simple browser extension (Chrome or Firefox) that you can use to analyse a site and get a score out of 100.  The higher the score is, the faster the site.

The great thing about this tool is that not only will it asses how fast your site is, but it will give to detailed suggestions of the different areas that you need to improve upon.  This is fantastic as you have a clear plan of action of what you need to do to get your site loading faster.

Before I made the switch to our new look website, I ran a PageSpeed test and found that this site had a score of 70 (out of 100) for site speed with a ton of suggestions to improve upon.  I’m happy to say now that we have a score of 92 (out of 100) since making the changes that I will talk about below.