It's the start of another week and that means we've got another 5 awesome tips that you can use to power up your website. Let's get started…

This article is part of our “Power Up” series to help you learn new skills and take your website to the next level.

1. Minify your JavaScript & CSS

‘Minifying’ your code means removing its unnecessary bytes, including any extra spaces, line breaks and indentation to increase your page load speeds. There are a range of great tools out there to help you do this, including Closure Compiler, JSMin and YUI Compressor.

2. Set up event tracking in Google Analytics

Adding event tracking to your links and downloads will give you a clear view of how people are really using your website. For example, you could track how many times a file has been downloaded, a video has been played, an ad has been clicked and so on.

To start adding event tracking to links, simply populate the following structure with the details of the event you’re looking to track and attach it to the appropriate UI element on your site:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent’, 'category’, ‘action’, ‘label’, Value, interaction).

If you wanted to use tracking to find out how many people downloaded one of your whitepapers, you might use code like this:

<a href=”/white-papers/white-paper.pdf” onClick=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'white paper', 'Download', Research into X']);”>Download now</a>.

Then go back to Google Analytics later to view the results.

3. Streamline your images

To optimise your website’s page speeds try reducing the size of its images. You can do this using solutions such as the EWWW Image Optimiser WordPress plugin or JPEGmini to achieve the smaller size without compromising on image quality.

4. Test your site for cross-browser compatibility

With the growth of mobile browsing and the wide range of different OSs now available ensuring that your site looks great across these different formats is now essential to creating great impressions with your audiences. Using an online tool such as BrowserStack allows you to quickly and easily evaluate your site's presentation and layout across a range of popular browsers. 

5. Create an XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a list of all the different links that your website contains and, once you’ve created one, you can send it Google Webmaster Tools. This will help ensure that you provide all pages that are active on your site, making it easier for Google to discover and index your site’s content. Try the XML-Sitemaps.com tool to create your sitemap and then you can submit it to Google Webmaster Tools here.

Be sure to check back next week for another 5 great tips to take your website to the next level.