Speeding up your Website

Here is a list of what you can do to make your website faster.

  • Try and see if you can use a CDN in your webhost control panel
  • If you cannot, use the CDN Plugin "Shift8 CDN"
  • Use HTML5 Videos instead of gifs
  • Use jpg's instead of png's
  • Make sure "Lay Options" → "Lazy Loading" is activated
  • Make sure "Lay Options" → "Carousel Addon" → "Lazyload images" is turned on
  • Disable any plugins you don't use, including Lay Theme Addons you don't use
  • Ask your webhost why your site might be loading slowly, maybe your server is slow. Maybe you can upgrade your webhosting package to a faster one.
  • If you don't use a caching plugin: Make sure the option "Lay Options" → "Disable Ajax / Compatibility Mode" is disabled. This can at least speed up subsequent pageloads when you click on links on your website. It does not speed up the initial website-page load. If you use a caching plugin make sure this option is activated. Otherwise the caching plugin won't work.
  • Set "Transition duration when navigating" to 0 in "Lay Options"
  • Use HTML5 video files that are smaller in file-size. Handbrake is a desktop app that I recommend for compressing videos.
  • If you use HTML5 videos on desktop and use the same videos for phone, they might be too big for phone. In this case you could create a Custom Phone Layout and insert HTML 5 videos with smaller file size. Or you could just use YouTube or Vimeo Videos.