How To Speed Up Your Website And Be More Eco Friendly
photo credit: Robert S. Donovan
Every time a web page loads it uses energy so the faster that your website loads the less energy it will use and the more eco friendly it will be. This is important for all websites but particularly so for those of us who care about the environment and try to offer advice on how to be be eco friendly.
Faster websites aren’t just good the environment – they also have other benefits too. For example it has been suggested in web design circles that faster websites often rank higher in the search engines meaning you will get more visitors to your website and of course a website that loads faster leads to a better visitor experience.
With this in mind we recently set out to investigate the concept of speeding up our website to make it both better for you as a visitor and also better for the planet. This article then focuses on the individual steps we took (all of which are very simple and either free or very low-cost) to signifiantly speed up our page load time.
Optimizing Images
Images take a lot of time to load and the more images your website has the slower it will typically load. So one key step to speeding up your website is to minimize the use of images. Certainly some are required by most websites to illustrate a point, to make their content more readable or simply to brand the site with their logo but you should aim to think intelligently about which images are really essential and which are not.
Once you have eliminated unnecessary images you can actually speed up how quickly the remaining images load in two ways. The first of these is to ensure that every image has a size specified in pixels. The second is to use an “image crunching” service like Yahoo’s SmushIt. These services reduce down the overall quality of an image so it looks just the same to your website visitors but has a smaller file size – and hence loads more quickly.
As we run this site on WordPress we employed the free Wp SmushIt plugin which will automatically run all the images on your site through the SmushIt service and then reinstall them on your site in their more compact, faster-loading form.
Removing Unnecessary Files And Plugins
The next step we took in speeding up this site was the carefully go through every aspect of the site to try and identify anything redundant. For example we deleted any plugins we weren’t using, any themes we didn’t need and any article drafts that we had forgotten to delete after publishing the final article.
This was mainly a manual process of logging into our eco web hosting account and our WordPress control panel then inspecting every element one at a time to make an informed decision about whether each element was necessary for this site to run. In other words it takes time but it’s definitely time well spent.
Fix Your Database
Most content management software such as WordPress and Joomla use databases to store all the various parts of your website and over time these databases can become bloated with unnecessary elements that will slow down how quickly your site loads.
We used a free WordPress plugin called Wp Clean Fix to quickly identify any issues with our database (it found hundreds!) and then either fix them or delete them.
Set Up Web Page Caching
Imagine two different pages on your website. Sure, the writing will be different but many elements such as your logo, navigation menu and so on are all the same irrespective of the page you’re looking at.
Web page caching essentially stores the more frequently-used elements of your website in a more accessable location so that they can be loaded far quicker. Whilst every one of the changes listed above made some difference to how quickly this site loads it was setting up caching which really had the biggest overall effect.
Fortunately a wide range of options exist to make this process childs-play and we opted for the W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress which is free and does an admirable job.
The Results
The above steps may sound long-winded and complicated but by using the small number of free plugins listed above we found that this site took less than an hour to optimize for speed so it really is a small investment when you compare it to the benefits that such a process produces.
Out of interest we used a service before and after our tweaks to see just how much we managed to speed up the load time of this site and I think the following screen captures do an excellent job of showing just how easy it is to make your website more eco friendly.
In short, we managed to speed the time it takes for this site to load by around 30% - and in doing so we are saving a considerable amount of energy every time a new visitor arrives at this site.
Before: 3.2 secs to load
After: 2 secs to load
Related Eco Friendly Articles:
- 10 Ways To Make Your Bathroom Greener
- Six Steps To Make Your Website More Eco Friendly
- 7 Ways To Make Your Office More Green
Other Eco Friendly Articles We Recommend:
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[...] How To Speed Up Your Website And Be More Eco Friendly – Eco Living Advice. I doubt these tips actually save much energy, but they’re common sense that I need to keep in mind. [...]