You might be able to get visitors to your site with a mixture of natural searches and PPC, but can you keep them there? Fast loading websites are key to higher conversions. I am going to describe just a few ways to speed up your site without too much effort.

Compression:
Images generally cannot be compressed any more than they already are by the web server, however html, javascript and css files do lend themselves to compression prior to outputting in the browser. Most modern web server software such as apache supports compression in the form of gzip. If the files requested by the browser are smaller because they have been compressed, they will undoubtedly be served up quicker, offering the visitor a more pleasant experience.

Persistent Database connections:
Connecting to a database can be quite a time consuming affair for your software, so if at all possible, try and keep database connections open rather than closing them after every database call. This can save half a second or more per page load if there are many database calls in your scripts.

Using Indexes in your database:
Another database performance enhancer is adding indexes to all foreign keys and fields that are often referred to in your SQL ‘WHERE’ clauses. It is like your queries looking through the index of a book rather than flicking through each page to find what is looking for. If you have many records in your database, I strongly recommend you start adding indexes to the relevant fields.

Caching:
If your content doesn’t change much, caching can be a great way of relieving stress on the server as well as serving up pages faster. A cached page is one that has already been processed by the server once, all the database calls and data manipulation have been done, and all that is left is a flat html file. Very quick to serve up, your visitors will thank you for it.

Far future expires headers:
If your images, javascript and css files don’t change often, consider adding far future expires headers in the configuration of your web server. This means that the users browser will download the files once and depending on when you set the header to expire, they may not have to download them again for a long time. They will be served up by their browsers cache instead.

There are many more way to speed up your website, from efficient coding to  hosting your site on a server as geographically close to you target audience as possible. Some techniques can add an extra burden to your server, others can actually relieve it. The issue of page load times should be high on the agenda of any website owner who is serious about improving conversions.

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