Website performance is a crucial factor in the success of any digital or online business campaign today. It is a function of the speed and quality of a website’s rendering in the user’s browser.
Those factors have a major effect on the user’s website experience. That, in turn, affects the broader performance metrics. The metrics are click through and conversion rates, mobile traffic, search engine rankings, and customer loyalty.
There is no absolute standard for how well a webpage should perform. But, a few things are known about general user ideals regarding performance.
For instance, the standard gauge for webpage loading speed is 2 seconds. Further, speed rankings show that if a site has a loading speed of less than 2.8s, it ranks among the best 20% of websites. Likewise, a speed of fewer than 2.2 seconds will place a site in the top 10%.
Slower loading speeds make web users lose interest, and they may never return. This is why website optimization is a crucial part of website design and development.
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What Is Website Optimization, and Why Is It Necessary?
Website optimization uses tools and techniques to boost web performance and user experience. It also has to do with managing the various factors that affect how a website performs.
Website performance can be affected by factors that have nothing to do with the website itself. This may include network speed and browser quality. Factors like this are beyond your control as a webmaster. But some factors have to do with your website itself.
Image Credits: Unsplash
For instance, we all know visual units like images are crucial for websites these days. Others like styles and fonts also combine to affect page weight. And that, in turn, affects performance.
Improved user experience due to web speed improvement boosts the metrics mentioned above. They are:
- Conversion rates
- Customer confidence and loyalty
- Search rankings
- Mobile/device traffic
On the other hand, failure to optimize website performance leads to:
- Greater bounce rates
- Loss of customer confidence
- Low search rankings
- Scant mobile/device traffic.
A lot of web admins make the mistake of getting lazy about website performance. Webmasters often express thoughts like, “my website is performing at top speed.” And they take this to mean that no further performance boost is needed. “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
But these are risky sentiments. Companies constantly strive to push web performance bounds in today’s competitive market. If you relax about your current web performance, you will soon be left behind. If your webpage loading speed is already under the two-second gauge, try to shave off milliseconds (ms). There is always room to improve.
But, it may also be the case that your business leaves you too little time and means to optimize your website. In that case, you can go with the more convenient option. You can hire a web design agency to handle optimizing your website. Maxburst is the best web design and development agency NYC has to offer. So, if you reside in NY and require web design services, look no further. You can also avail yourself of Maxburst’s web design expertise from anywhere in the nation.
Ways to Increase Website Performance
You must note that no one practice will fix all your performance issues. Boosting performance depends on many factors. And different methods will be needed for each factor. At best, some may boost performance better than others.
Image Credits: Pexels
You have to use as many of these methods as needed to get the best results. So, sit back as I walk you through some of the best ways to get better web performance results.
- Optimize Your Images
Images are some of the biggest reasons for slow webpage loading.
Back in 2018, a fellow on Facebook linked me to a page on his blog. To be sure, this page was poorly arranged, and reading through it was a doozy. But the most frustrating part of the affair was that I had to wait four whole minutes for the page to load completely – all 46.2MB of it!
This has a two-fold reason: network speed was a bit slow that evening, and the page was almost wholly composed of king-size images.
Of course, network speed was a factor. But, by comparison, a Snopes page I opened just after took just over 8s to load.
The lesson is fairly simple: images add weight to a webpage, thus causing it to load slower. This is not to say that you should not use images. But, there are some things you can do to ease the weight due to images.
You can start by cropping images, so they don’t exceed page width. But then, it would be best if you looked at the image size. Of course, the ideal image size depends on what you’re using it for. But, in general, the ideal is 60kb for hero headers or banners; 100kb for high-end images.
Image extension is also another factor to look at. JPEG is good for keeping as much image detail as possible at less size. You should also use fewer images and pay attention to formatting and text font.
- Website Content
“Content is King”. It is no secret that content plays a major role in the potential rankings of our website. It is imperative that we have a resource page or blog page wherein we provide actually valuable and credible content to the readers.
There are various facets to be taken into consideration when creating a shareable asset or any sort of content for your website.
Articles optimized to rank for a particular keyword is just the tip of the iceberg. You can also consider working with a content marketing service provider who can help you with customized content that falls in line with your business goals.
- Disperse Server Load
It has been common hosting practice for a website to be hosted on one server. Surfers must access a website through that one server. But, this practice has some grave cons. For one, there is a limit to how many connections a single server can handle at once. For another, the website can’t be accessed when that one server goes down.
Also, the more users there are on one server, the slower the connection. That lowers the webpage’s performance. You can lessen this problem by dispersing your server load. The major ways of doing this are content dispersion networks (CDNs) and load balancing.
CDNs are networks of servers spread out over large areas. They host website content outside the webmaster’s main server. Users can then access the website through the server closest to their locale.
Load balancing involves dispersing network traffic across many servers in different locations. As a result, various tasks are hosted on different servers with the result that no single server bears too much of the traffic.
Both CDNs and load balancers help reduce the network traffic on each server. However, by doing so, they raise response time and webpage loading speed.
So, spending some money on CDNs and load balancers is an excellent way to boost your website’s performance.
- Take Advantage of Website Caching
Cache technology is another way to boost your website performance. It involves storing copies of a website or webpage’s data on the user’s device or a CDN. They may include media such as images, scripts, and files.
When a user enters a site for the first time, their browser or CDN server may keep some data from the site.
This way, the user’s device does not have to send database requests to access the website every time. Instead, the cached website data will be loaded from their device or the CDN. This will cut down the time needed to load the webpage.
Image Credits: Unsplash
The caching options that are open to you will depend on your website platform. For instance, if you are using WordPress, you will have access to many options like LiteSpeed cache. However, other platforms may have fewer caching options.
- Reduce Plug-ins
Web surfers are very familiar with plugins. They are third-party programs that add to the functioning of a website. They are a common feature of web platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla!, which feature content handling systems.
But, while they expand the range of things one can do on a website, they need extra resources to run. And the more plugins there are, the more resources you will need to run them. This slows down the website and dilutes its security.
Besides, some plugins may turn useless over time.
I advise that you go through the plugins on your site. See which ones are slowing down performance, and access their use. Then, remove the useless ones.
- Consider a Better and Faster Web Host
Different hosting services have different performance ratings. So, it is in your best interest to use one that assures you better performance.
Of course, which hosting services you can choose from will depend on your means and hosting type. The fastest hosting services you can choose from in 2022 are:
- Hostinger: Hostinger is the cheapest speed-oriented service at the moment, and it offers an average web page speed of 936ms.
- Siteground: Siteground is suited for small businesses and gives an average web page speed of 1.1s.
- InMotion Hosting: InMotion is speed and security-oriented and gives a webpage speed of 825ms.
- Cloudways: is a VPS-based hosting service that offers a webpage speed of 914ms, and it is suited for big website projects.
- WP Engine: is a WordPress hosting service that offers a webpage speed of 1.1s.
Key Takeaways
- Performance complacency is a bad move. Never get content with your current website performance. There is always room to improve.
- Your ideal website loading time should be at least 2s. Of course, the longer the loading, the more bored visitors to your site will get.
- Don’t neglect optimization. If you can’t do it yourself and have no team to do it, hire an agency.
Closing Thoughts
It can be a challenging task to optimize your website’s performance. There are many things you can do to pull this off, and a lot of them are complex. But, while some of them need regular practice (e.g., checking plugins), many only need to be done once or once in a while. For instance, you don’t need to choose a new hosting service every other month.
Finally, in the interest of more effective optimization, I advise that you learn which website features have the most effect on website performance. Then, focus first on optimizing those that reduce performance the most. That will provide a greater prior boost to your website performance. Then, you can turn your attention to the less significant ones.
Of course, it’s even easier for those living in and around NYC, you can avail yourself of Maxburst’s web design professionals to get the very best image on your website.
