Zippy Promotion Forums Webmaster Chat The General Webmaster Zone Website speed optimization

Building websites is significantly different than it was just 10 years ago. Website speed and optimization has to be a core focus when developing the site. Not only does Google now have speed a part of rankings, but people's attention spans also are getting shorter and shorter thanks to short form media that people are addicted to these days.

If a site doesn't load in just a couple seconds, often times, you lost a user.

Some of the biggest things you can do is to optimize and compress your images (hopefully, you're using the new image format standards), leveraging browser caching, CDNs, etc.

What are some tactics you use as a webmaster to ensure you have a speedy website?

My friend who does all the graphic design work for my board will compress the images and make sure they are fully optimized for performance. I should probably host a lot of my JavaScript into a file for browser caching, but I never got around to it. Apparently sometimes specifying the width and height of images can help with performance, which I tend to do.

I use Lighthouse attached to the Google Chrome dev tools to help dictate what I can do to better the performance of my board.

I can't do anything server-side since my board isn't self-hosted, so I hope the forum software owner does what he can to help with performance in that area.

I limit visual content usage, I also avoid embedding content. If you have a lot of visual content and have embedded content, your site tends to load slow. I also limit plugin usage, a lot of plugins can slow your website. Last but not least, I use light weight theme so that my website loads faster.

I have enjoyed putting my forums and blogs on Cloudflare and adding rules to combat all the bots.

I feel like that has helped a lot with speed.