Test your website speed
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I just found this website from google where it tests the speed of a website for free, which I assume for us artists would be testing our portfolio sites.
Site is here: testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com
It's quite interesting because it gave a couple interesting facts about my site. If you ask to email yourself a report it shows what's good and bad about the website. It lists things like JavaScript and Html (I don't know how to use any of those) but it also told me I may want to fix image compression on my site, which is actually helpful because I know some of my images are big-ish and I know I can fix this.
I know I don't personally code my website. I use a website builder service and I assume a lot do, so things like JavaScript and html (although I know many allow access to customers) may be out of range to fix. I wouldn't worry about it too much, but if things do turn out really bad, it may be a great eye opener to switch services, or if you do know how to code maybe realize issues you never saw.
Google thought my website was pretty good in general.(and if anyone else thinks so I use adobe portfolio) I wouldn't worry too much, but I think its a good tool to be aware of and I just thought I'd share this to the forums.
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Time to get my geek on. The javascript and HTML stuff only applies if you build and maintain your own website. I tried Google site speed test on my site once and then implemented site server caching and minified the code with plugins. I came to the conclusion that the fastest option would be to go back to the old days and make a non-database driven static website with minified HTML code (squashes is all together and removes whitespace) and no javascript and tiny images, but I haven't got the time or the inclination to do that right now and it takes all the fun out of it.
The main thing to be aware of is to optimise images for the web by not making them too big and saving them for the web at 72 dpi. I use the save for web plugin in IrfanView to do that but there are loads of ways to do it. You can also further shrink them by using compression software like FileOptimizer- again there are probably many ways to do that as well but I like FileOptimizer and IrfanView because they are free and Open Source and they seem to work ok.
