How To Make A Weebly Website Load Faster

These are common terms in the web development communities, but for this article they have a slightly different zeal. This type of optimization revolves around the things you do directly on your website. With the proper techniques and some cleaning of the clutter on your Weebly website, you can do a lot to speed things up. First let’s focus on the very basics of building your Website, the theme. Themes are the groundwork of everything your website is based on and are the first elements that load for a Weebly website. To ensure you have a fast loading Weebly theme you have to make sure that it keeps certain load time variables correct. 1. Keep things minimal if you can.

2. Minimize the use of images and multimedia. 3. Properly format images to desired size, either with Microsoft paint, or another tool and keep them as small as possible. 4. Keep your HTML and CSS as clean and un-cluttered as you can. Try not to use too many add on-s. 5. Utilize CSS effects for headers, backgrounds and menus, instead of using full size images. Moral of the story, the more you have, the longer it takes to load. Following some simple disciplines in your websites creation can save you on load time. There are some simple on page factors and practices to follow when building your website.

Off page optimization factors for a Weebly website are a little trickier. Weebly has its hosting tied in with all of the other services it provides. While Weebly offers a very efficient form of cloud hosting to customers it can still bog down on load times. Also optimization becomes difficult, because there is little you can do to tweak load time factors that have to do with your Weebly hosting. The workaround I have found is to include your Weebly website into a content delivery network, or CDN for short. Content delivery networks make your website load faster by caching your website on their servers.

This allows the CDN to more efficiently deliver your websites data and in-turn gives you a quicker load time. Again this is kind of a tricky little work around and I have not tried it with a domain that is registered with Weebly, but I will and I will report my findings here when I do. 1. I purchased a domain name from Go Daddy. This gives you better control over your DNS options for your domain. 2. I then used Weebly’s domain transfer tool to set my new domain as the default for my Weebly website. This is great because Weebly still hosts the domain, even though it was purchased elsewhere. 3. I then followed all of the on page optimization procedures that we already discussed and constructed my website. 4. Next I signed up for a Cloud Flare free account, just for starters and went through the set up instructions provided by Cloud Flare. 5. Activated desired features in Cloud Flare and after about 7 days I started to see better load times. Down from 20-10 seconds total load time to 15-5 seconds total load time.