I know how to build websites that load efficiently and smoothly, but there still a few things that I'll need from your server....

When I code a website

There are a number of things that I do to the website code to make sure it loads efficiently. These include but not limited to;

• Deflation – Making the browser only load the code that the browser needs. Why upload ALL the code for the entire website when the user only needs to read the one page and one section
• Concatenation – Merging files together so the browser will only load one file instead of multiple
• Minification – Compressing files so they are smaller, hence quicker for the browser to load

Once again the above is just a simplified sample of what I do.

In a nutshell

If you are serious about making your website load efficiently. Ask your server about;

• Caching
• CDN

Caching

Caching is downloading images and other website files onto the computer, so the next time we you view that same website we see the images that we’ve already downloaded. Without this every time we load that same website we have to wait for the images all over again, so it’s much quicker for a website to load when images are cached. Pretty much all website browsers like Chrome and Firefox already come with caching, but thats just “browser cache”, if your server comes “server cache” we can take it to a whole new level.

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

This is when your website is hosted not on one but on multiple servers. So when somebody views your website in Singapore, they will view the website hosted on the Singapore server, when somebody views your website in LA, they will view the website hosted on the LA Server. This is just a very rough example to help you understand, with a CDN people will load your website from a server thats closest to them. The closer you are to the server, the more faster your website will load. Without a CDN the website may be faster for someone in LA, but slow for someone all the way in Singapore.

Once again the web hosting service that you’re using may already come with it’s own CDN service, so ask your web hosting service provider for more info. Otherwise a good place to look is CloudFlare.

Website image Optimization

You can get a plugin like WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer, these plugins simply strip out data from the image files, so the only data that is on the file is the data required to have the image. Examples of data that’ll be stripped out would be extra spaces and formatting, meta data that’s generated by other apps for record and index keeping purposes).

Last modified: January 10, 2022