How fast your website

Video files can easily take up over MB. If you use a shared server, you have a limited amount of space. Videos can make you quickly exceed this limit. In some cases, large video files may even violate your terms of Acceptable Use, which can end up getting your hosting account shut down altogether.

And even if you can upload large videos to your hosting provider, it will likely provide a poor user experience. If multiple users attempt to watch a video on your site at the same time, your server will need to deliver that huge file to all of them. If your server has a limited amount of bandwidth, this can result in lags and pauses in playback. Instead, host your video on a third-party service like YouTube , Vimeo , or Wistia. When most people think of online video, they think of YouTube.

The biggest potential advantage to YouTube is that it can help you reach a larger audience. The one notable downside to YouTube is that it has a minute limit for most videos. After YouTube, Vimeo is the second-largest video hosting platform with million views per month.

So while it still has the potential to get your videos in front of a new audience, your potential audience smaller than it would be with YouTube. The platform offers comprehensive analytics, including where your visitors come from, where they click, and how far into a video they stop watching.

It also lets you include calls to action directly in your videos, and even require them to sign up for your email list before watching. You can also customize your autoplay settings load settings, captions, and share options, and make it easy for users to skip to certain points in the video by adding chapters.

CSS holds the style requirements for your page. Generally, your website accesses this information in one of two ways: In an external file, which loads before your page renders, or inline, meaning it is in the HTML document itself. If you have more than one external CSS file, each one adds to your page load time. Fortunately, this is a simple process, and one that can usually be accomplished with nothing more than copy and paste. Having just recommended that you use only one CSS stylesheet and no inline CSS, there is one caveat you need to consider.

You can improve user experience by having your above the fold top of the page section load faster — even if the rest of the page takes a few seconds to load. This is called lazy loading and is particularly helpful for pages with lots of content below the fold.

With lazy loading, it can load the content within view first, then load all of those photos after. And if you run your site on WordPress, enabling it is as easy as installing a plugin. There are plenty of options you can use to start using lazy loading on your site. Lazy Load is an extremely simple plugin that uses jQuery. All you need to do is install and activate it Then, the plugin will automatically detect when an image is visible for a user, and load it.

There are no settings or customization options to mess with — which, depending on your preferences, could either be a good thing or a bad one. BJ Lazy Load is another relatively simple plugin, but offers a few more options for customization.

First, you can determine which content on your site you want to lazy load. This can include content, thumbnails, gravatars, images, and iframes. This gives you more control over the speed and function of how your page loads. WP Rocket. If you already use WP Rocket , you can also use the plugin to enable lazy loading.

You can also use snippets of code to disable lazy loading for specific types of pages, like your home page or blog page. When images appear all at once, they can provide a jarring experience for visitors. You can make them appear more gradually by adding a snippet to your CSS file. You can use them to add custom functionality, clean up your code, improve user experience, and more.

They also eliminate the need to mess with a lot of code, which makes for an extremely user-friendly experience when working on your site. This makes it easy to continue adding and installing plugins, without considering the potential downside.

They can slow your site, create security issues, and even cause crashes and other technical difficulties. Any that are outdated, inefficient, or incorrectly configured can have a negative impact on your site speed. Deactivating and deleting any that are unnecessary can both improve your overall speed and make maintenance easier in the long run. There are a few different ways you can evaluate the plugins on your site and weed out any that slow your site speed.

This can be a tedious process if you have a lot of plugins, but will show you the difference each one makes. First, run a speed test with all of your plugins enabled.

You can do this with tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom, or any other site speed tool you prefer. Make a note of your page load times after each test, and which plugins you deactivated to achieve faster speeds. But Plugin Performance Profiler is a solid option for identifying plugins that are causing issues on your site.

This will take a few minutes, then show you a report with a detailed breakdown of how each plugin on your site is performing. The plugin load time at the top of the report tells you the cumulative load time for all of the plugins on your site, as well as the percentage of your total load time they make up. You can also see a detailed timeline with information about every plugin, your theme, and the core for each page. This will help you identify exactly what the issue is on slow-loading pages.

Finally, you can keep a history of your performance scans directly in the plugin. One easy win to look for here is your contact form plugin, if you have one.

If you notice that your contact form plugin is slowing your site down, double-check to see if this feature comes with your theme. If so, update your forms and delete the plugin. So even if the sheer volume is slowing your site, deleting them may not be an option. Fortunately, there are many plugins that can accomplish more than one goal, and finding them can help you eliminate plugins that only serve one purpose.

If you had both of them installed on your site, you could evaluate the features you use on each and see if either could do everything you need. Then, enable all of those features in the plugin you choose to stick with, and deactivate the other. If you have a lot of plugins installed, you may be surprised at how many of the simpler ones can easily be eliminated by enabling a feature in a more robust one.

Depending on your level of experience, you can also cut down on your amount of plugins by doing certain tasks manually. For example, many site owners use a plugin to add their Google Analytics tracking code to their header. If you have the Insert Headers and Footers plugin or a similar one installed to edit other parts of your header tag, you can copy your Google Analytics code from your admin dashboard, then paste it here.

Another basic plugin you may have installed is a font plugin. Go to Google Fonts and select the font you want to use on your site. You can do this with as many fonts as you want, too.

So you can fully customize how all of the text on your site appears, without a single plugin. Redirects are often necessary when you move and delete pages, and are the best way to eliminate issues with broken links. But having too many of them can create additional HTTP requests, which can negatively impact speed, particularly on mobile devices.

In fact, Google says that ideally, site owners would eliminate them entirely. You can start by using Screaming Frog to quickly identify all of the redirects currently on your site.

You can also use this opportunity to identify redirects chains, or redirects that point to other redirected pages. This creates unnecessary extra requests, which can slow down your load times. If you find any redirect chains, you can edit your. As we mentioned above, the fewer requests your site makes to your server, the faster a page will load.

For example, if you use Gravatar for blog comments, you might notice that loading user images adds a significant amount to your load time. Or, if your site is integrated with Twitter for easily sharing posts, this might also increase the number of HTTP requests your site makes.

Of course, some of these extra features are worth the milliseconds they add to your load times. In this case, you can leave them as-is. It can also help you make more informed decisions about the features you choose to add to your site in the future. Monitoring your load times on a regular basis can help you catch any issues early on, and keep your site in good shape. There are many tools you can do to accomplish this.

Simply enter your URL, then select where you want to test your site from. This can help you identify trends, and the precise time your site begins having issues — making it easy to get to the root of any problems. The paid version also includes alerts and uptime monitoring, which monitor your site and automatically alert you of issues. Send test result link to team members using your favorite communication channels. Google ranks your page on its mobile speed, and mobile Internet users have surpassed desktop users.

Select the size of the browser window we use for your test and view the resulting load times. Http request and response headers contain lots of useful information that help you understand specific checks. Make sure to inspect them for slow or not found elements. Uptrends reporting can send you the data you need to spot problem locations and performance trends. Even the most subtle changes within your site or the systems that support it can blow up your efforts to maintain a performant site.

With Web Performance Monitoring , you can automate your checks and know the moment something causes site performance to slip. Uptrends' advanced alerting will let you know if it finds a discrepancy in your content, response size, response code, or authentication fails.

Let Uptrends help you to improve and maintain your website speed. Uptrends Wordmark Uptrends Mobile icon. By team. By industry.

Customer cases. Live demo. Support center. Developers API. What's new. View all tools. GTmetrix requires JavaScript to function properly. Please enable JavaScript in your browser and refresh the page to ensure the best GTmetrix experience. Get started for free. Set up an alert and get notified when your page underperforms. We'll send you an alert linked to a full report so you can know what happened.

See how your page performs in 22 different global test locations and make sure it loads fast for all your visitors worldwide. Need to use GTmetrix in a professional capacity? Sign up today and get a suite of features and options to make optimizing your website speed clear and easy!

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