15 Practical Tips to Improve Your Website’s Speed

In my previous blog, I discussed how a slow website can harm your business. But how can you ensure your website becomes fast again?

In this blog, I’ve gathered 15 practical tips to improve your website’s speed.

1. Say Goodbye to Budget Hosting

Everyone likes to save money; after all, you’re Dutch. But saving on hosting is one of the worst things you can do for your website’s speed.

Shared hosting is a popular and inexpensive way to host your website. With shared hosting, you share the server with 10, 100, or even thousands of other websites. This allows hosting providers to offer web hosting at low costs since the server expenses are split across all websites.

Although this concept sounds appealing, it has several drawbacks. I always like to compare it to sharing a house during your student years.

It’s nice to share costs and have company, but it’s not always smooth sailing. Think about a busy shower in the morning or a kitchen filled with someone else’s dirty dishes. And then there are the times when your housemates throw a party while you have an important exam the next day.

It’s no surprise that very few people with their own homes are eager to go back to student housing.

The same applies to your website. Instead of shared hosting, you can host your website on a dedicated (virtual) server, which offers several benefits:

• Your website has full access to the server’s capacity.
• Your website isn’t affected by the impact of other websites.
• You have full control over the server and can configure it as you wish.

For as little as €7.50 per month, you can get a (virtual) server. If you have limited technical knowledge, consider a managed (virtual) server where the technical management is handled for you.

There are also hosting solutions designed specifically for platforms like WordPress and Magento. These (virtual) servers are optimized to get the most out of your WordPress website.

Do yourself and your website a favor and move away from cheap shared hosting solutions. Providers I personally recommend:

• Virtual servers: Transip, DigitalOcean, Virtio
• WordPress hosting: Hyperhost, Flywheel
• Static hosting: Netlify, Firebase

2. Optimize Your Images

Images are often the biggest bottleneck for website speed. Depending on how your CMS is set up, you may be uploading oversized images.

It’s common for images to be 5–10 MB in size. If you have multiple such images, your website will become significantly slower, increasing unnecessary data costs for visitors.

First, ensure that your image dimensions match your website’s design. If your website is 700 pixels wide, your images should be no wider than 700 pixels (or 1400 pixels for retina displays). There’s no need to upload an image that is 5000 pixels wide.

Next, optimize your images with proper compression. Compression reduces file size without visibly affecting quality.

One of my favorite tools for this is TinyPNG. It’s free and can reduce image sizes by 50–70% without noticeable quality loss.

Lastly, use a separate set of images for smartphones. Since mobile screens are smaller than laptop screens, it makes sense to load smaller image versions for mobile devices.

3. Check and Fix Broken Links

Over time, hyperlinks to pages or images on your website may stop working. It’s wise to check for broken links regularly.

A broken link can slow down your website. The visitor’s browser requests all assets from your server and waits for a response before downloading them. If a link is broken, the server takes longer to return an answer because it’s searching for a missing file or page.

Use a tool like Dead Link Checker to scan your website for broken links. If you use Google Analytics, you can also find 404 errors in your analytics dashboard.

Fix broken links by adding redirects, correcting typos, or restoring missing images and pages.

4. Reduce the Number of Assets

At worst, a browser can only download one asset at a time. Imagine your homepage contains:

• 2 videos
• 18 images
• 8 JavaScript files
• 3 fonts
• 8 CSS files

That’s 39 assets that need to be downloaded individually. Depending on their size, this could take up to 10 seconds—a delay that visitors won’t tolerate.

Use a tool like Pingdom or WebPageTest to analyze how many assets your website loads. Remove unnecessary assets whenever possible.

5. Eliminate Unnecessary Website Features

This tip goes hand in hand with the previous one: regularly assess the features on your website.

One common culprit for slow websites is image sliders. These require multiple images to load, plus extra JavaScript and CSS. A slider can easily add 5–10 extra assets.

Ask yourself whether a slider is truly necessary. Instead, consider showing just the first slide, as it’s usually the most valuable content for visitors.

6. Use Browser Caching

Browser caching stores website assets in the visitor’s browser, so they don’t need to be reloaded every time the user visits your site.

If your website runs on WordPress, enable browser caching with W3 Total Cache, a popular caching plugin.

7. Minimize and Combine Assets

Developers write code in a readable format with spaces and indentation. While this helps humans, it doesn’t benefit the server.

By minimizing your code (removing spaces and line breaks), you reduce file size and improve loading times.

Also, combine multiple JavaScript and CSS files into one file each. Instead of loading 10 CSS files, your website will now load just one, improving speed.

For WordPress, use Autoptimize to automatically minimize and merge assets.

8. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN speeds up your website by distributing assets across a global network of servers. This means visitors can load assets from a server close to them rather than waiting for data from a distant location.

Popular CDN providers: Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Akamai

9. Limit Redirects

Redirects zijn een handig hulpmiddel om je bezoekers en zoekmachines door te Redirects are useful for guiding users to updated content, but too many redirects slow down your site.

For example, if your Team Page redirects to an About Us Page, which later redirects to a Company Page, visitors will experience unnecessary delays.

Instead, update the first redirect so the Team Page points directly to the Company Page.

10. Avoid Pre-Made Themes

Using pre-made themes to save money may seem appealing, but these themes often include excessive JavaScript and CSS, making your site sluggish.

Many pre-made themes try to appeal to a broad audience by packing in features you’ll never use. But every unnecessary feature adds to your page load time.

For a fast website, opt for a custom-built design that only includes what you need.

11. Enable the HTTP/2 Protocol on Your Server

As mentioned in tip four, a browser can, in the worst case, only download one asset at a time due to the limitations of the HTTP/1.1 protocol. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and is the standard for internet communication.

The HTTP/1.1 protocol was introduced around 1997 as the standard. It wasn’t until 2012 that work began on its successor, HTTP/2, which was completed in May 2015. Since the end of 2016, browsers have supported the HTTP/2 protocol. The biggest advantage of HTTP/2 for your website’s speed is that it allows the browser to download multiple assets simultaneously.

When a visitor to your website has a fast internet connection, they can download multiple images at the same time. Naturally, this is much faster than downloading them one by one via the older HTTP/1.1 protocol.

Contact your hosting provider to activate the HTTP/2 protocol.

12. Load Images Lazily

If your website is larger than the screen size, it doesn’t make sense to load all content at once. Instead, you can choose to load certain assets of your website “lazily.”

Lazy loading means that an asset is not immediately loaded but only when a specific action is performed. A common trigger for this is a visitor’s scrolling behavior.

Using JavaScript, you can determine how far a user has scrolled through your website. Based on this information, an asset can be loaded only when needed.

Images are excellent candidates for lazy loading. They are usually the largest assets on your website and cause the most delay. There is no need to download all images in advance—it is much more efficient to load them only when the visitor scrolls down.

If your website runs on WordPress, there are plenty of plugins available to enable lazy loading for your images and videos.

13. Enable Compression on Your Server

You may have tried to send photos or MP3 files before and compressed them into a ZIP file first. The advantage of “zipping” files is that the total file size is significantly reduced due to compression.

A server can apply the same principle to your website’s assets. Using gzip compression, the size of your web pages can be reduced by up to 70%.

Enabling compression on your server must be done by your hosting provider.

14. Limit the Number of Share Widgets

Share widgets allow visitors to easily share your website on social media. Popular options include sharing via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and email.

However, each share widget often comes with its own JavaScript, CSS, and images. This results in a significant number of additional files that negatively impact your website’s speed.

Ask yourself: how likely is it that someone wants to share my website on social media? And if they do, wouldn’t they be willing to copy the link from their browser into Facebook, Twitter, or their email client?

Compare this probability to the negative impact on loading speed caused by share widgets. In 9 out of 10 cases, your website can function just fine without them.

After all, not having a share widget doesn’t mean your website can’t be shared on social media. A share widget is simply a convenience for your visitors.

15. Choose Standard Fonts

As mentioned in tip four, it’s good to limit the number of assets on your website. One type of asset you can reduce is fonts.

Two popular ways to add fonts to your website are Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit, which provide access to thousands of (free) fonts.

However, ask yourself: does my website really need a trendy font, or would a standard font suffice? The operating system of a computer or phone already includes a default set of fonts that you can use on your website.

Choosing a set of standard fonts often results in a faster website, but it may not align as well with your branding. Consider whether speed or branding is more important for your site.

Conclusion

Did you learn something from these tips? I’d appreciate it if you shared this blog with your friends and colleagues.

Need help improving your website’s speed? Feel free to contact me for a no-obligation quote.