Spiky here with a new article , today I’m going to give you a few tips on how to test the speed of your site as well as speeding up your site 5-10 folds.

In today’s world , everything has to be delivered HERE AND NOW like our Starbucks and Mcdonalds. No one wants to sit in front of their computer waiting 6-8 seconds for a website to load. So there are various solutions to fixing this problem of speed and the benefits will be beneficial to you and your readers.

It’s imperative that you get the following before we begin optimizing your website:

1) Adobe Fireworks (preferably the latest one if possible)

Personally I believe the 2 major factors that affect speed is “script load” & picture size. If you have like a million plugins activated on your CMS that depend on crazy stuff like Ajax, JavaScript, etc… , don’t expect it to load and work as fast as it was when it was just STOCK. Secondly if you have a fancy layout via css/jpg I can bet that if you add up all the pictures that help makeup your website it will certainly break on average 150-250kb.

Think about that 150-250kb on AVERAGE , that’s freaking huge ! If you were to compare that number to Facebook’s practically non-existent pictures in it’s layout you would realize why Facebook is so fast.

Before we get to any of that , I Suggest marking your load times , I found a few sites that do just exactly that and they have it down to the nano Second.

Yslow - Is a great add-on for Firefox that explains all the details about your website as far as how fast it loads and what is causing the slowdown. I love using this along with firebug to solve problems. Must have for anyone who wants to make their website sleek and pro. So go and download this.

The next 3 sites are what I used to measure the site loading times.

1) Web Monitoring Services

2) WebAnalyzer

3) IwebTool

“Remember to copy the results down so you can do a Before and After test to see if anything truly improved.”

So now you know how fast your website is , you will want to make it faster and this is where Fireworks plays its role extremely well. You will want to crush the size of the image files that make up your layout. So if your using Wordpress you will want to go to

yourwebsite.com/wp-content/themes/SomeTheme/images

Copy those to your desktop. Now start up Fireworks and follow my steps.

1) File > Batch

2) Select Export > Default setting is set to “Jpeg – Better Quality” ( This is fine or if you want to your picture size even SMALLER select “Jpeg – Smaller File” )

3) Hit Batch ! , It will make the files and automatically create a backup of your original jpegs.

Last step is to upload pictures back into your layout directory. Then go to your site and check if it loads faster if it does then congratulations if not then you may have an issue with a script or your hostprovider/server. Double check the websites I listed above to see if they give you faster times.

I hope this helps fill your Need For Speed (Pun intended)

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