Dotty Scott walks through concrete ways to speed up a website: converting Canva JPEGs to SVGs, removing unused affiliate plugins, and testing with Google PageSpeed Insights. Her own site jumped from a score of 12 to 70, with noticeably faster mobile load times.
Okay.
So Dotty, for those of us who have had websites for a very long time, is there a program we can run or is— what do we do? Because SVGs, I don't even know if they existed when I created my website. Like, what do you do to go back and optimize your website? Or is there a program I can run that says these are the things that you should change? Any, any recommendations on those of us who have had websites for a long time.
Yes, and I'm in the process of doing this myself right now. So on my Ask Dotty website, I, like Carol, I created all that stuff in Canva. So I actually went back a couple of weeks ago and I redownloaded everything and reuploaded it onto my website as SVG images. So I got rid of all of my JPEGs that I had on there. Bonus, they're more clear now. I think that's cool. And no longer do we have to have, you know, 3 sizes, big, medium, and small. It just— the browser knows what size, because again, it's not really an image, it's more code. So that's— and that's a major thing. To get your mobile site to load fast. So there's another— there's a tool online, and just Google the term Google PageSpeed Tester, um, and they have a tester, and you put in your URL. It's a free tool, and it'll give you a score from 1 to 100. And I'm ashamed to admit, my Ask Dotty website in December before I started all this was a score of 12. Terrible for a website designer, but it's not my main gig, you know what I mean? So I was able by adding— yeah, Anna, you're right— by adding, or by swapping out all of my images to SVG images and then doing a few other things that are recommended on that page. I got it from a 12 to— I think it's around a 70 right now. It goes up and down a little bit. This tester is not like— you're not going to get the same score every time. Um, it varies based on the internet. Um, but that's a huge gap or a huge improvement for very little technical work, like To get it to 100 is going to require technical work that I won't go into here. It's not something you guys would ever do. You would hire that done. But just the SVG images. The other thing I did was I got rid of something that wasn't being used, and that was my affiliate program that had a large, um, overhead on resources on my website. I had it up for a year. And I have not had one person refer anybody through it. So I figured that needs to go. I got rid of those two things, getting rid of about 10 plugins that was associated with that affiliate program and converting my images to SVG, more than doubled, what, tripled, um, my score, and my site loads way faster now.
