The importance of optimizing your website’s speed is more important now that ever before.  When your website loads faster, you will not only increase your websites usability, but you will also increase your SEO rankings as google takes into account load times when calculating your website’s organic ranking.  

So how can you optimize your website’s speed? Well, the first thing you will want to do is take a look at the images on your site and check to see how large they are. Images in actuality take up a lot of space on servers and can be a major contributor to slow load times.  So if you’re using a lot of images, make sure they are properly formatted as either a jpeg, png, or gif, (which are the standard file formats), and size them prior to uploading them so images aren’t relying solely on CSS.  Another tip is to try to avoid text graphics.  There may be some instances where HTML and CSS can not achieve the same effect, but if you can avoid using an image, avoid it at all costs.  Remember Images take up a lot of space and will definitely bog down the speed of your website.  Next, when structuring your DOM, never use inline CSS or JS but rather external files instead.  This is because your browser automatically caches these files in order to reduce load times, so linking these externally will be much more beneficial.  Lastly, if your using a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress, make sure you stay on top of the updates.  By keeping your website built up to date, you will automatically be increasing your load times as newer and faster software come out everyday.  So what are you waiting for, optimize your website speed and see how much your sites usability and SEO improve.