How To Speed Up Your Photography Website Or Blog

Photography websites and blogs are the hardest sites to speed up. Because of the media files that are contained in photography sites the loading speed is slow if the site is not well optimized. 

The load time of websites is very important factors because it affects usability; most Internet users will just skip a site altogether if it fails to load within a couple of seconds and crucially, Google this days uses load time as one of the factors of website ranking. If your photography site has ultra low load speed it will rank at the bottom of Google searches.

6 Tips on How To Optimize a Photography blog / website

I have used the following techniques to try and speed up one of my sites that is photo/image heavy. 

1. Alway edit Images Before Uploading Them

Before uploading the images always use the “Save for the web” feature included on image editing software. Images represent the heavier load on a photography site so make sure you are optimizing them. Alternatively you can also turn to an online image optimizer.

2. Avoid Using Flash on Your Photography site

Although flash based website look beautiful they are very slow to load. Apart from being slow, search engines are not able to read them and they rank poorly on search engines.

3. Use JPEG Image Formats For Photography Site

It is important that you choose the right format. JPEG format is suitable for photographs or true-color images. The GIF format should be used with flat-color images like logos or buttons. PNG works very similar to GIF but it supports more colors.

4. Optimize  The CSS Of Your Photography Site

Most websites suing popular platforms such as Wordpress or Joomla are designed with CSS. Make sure to aggregate and clean your CSS. CleanCSS is an online tool that will merge similar selectors, remove useless properties and remove the whitespace from your code.

5. Use a Slash on Your Links

When a user opens a link on the form “http://www.domain.com/about” the server will need to figure what kind of file or page is contained on that address. If you include a slash (/) at the end of the link the server will already know that this is a directory page, reducing the load time of the site.

6. Use VPS Web Hosting

VPS web hosting is more expensive than shared hosting but if your site is hosted on VPS server the load speed will be faster.