High-performing and fast websites exhibit better results in several parameters such as rankings, conversion rates, and even better engagement.In short, a slow website will never bring you a similar amount of income as the high performing one.
How to optimize for better website performance
That is the reason, in this list below, we will unveil some tips and steps to follow so that you may optimize your website for better performance.
Let’s first discuss the top three key benefits of a better performing website.
1. Speed optimization
According to research, nearly 79% of all website users are unlikely to go back and visit a website that has performance problems.
In addition, more than 60% of people who do their shopping online take into account website performance as a crucial component for using a website and staying loyal.
In other words, faster loading websites will most likely have higher quality leads.
2. Search engine visibility
When Google tries to rank your website in its search engine, it looks for different factors. One of the elements is speed. It measures that time the website takes to load and display results on the net.
The Google algorithm does not recommend websites that take long to load. They associate them with bad experiences to customers, thus downgrade them during ranking.
3. Best user experience
The time your website takes affects not only your website ranking but also the number those loyal clients who visit your website every day. You will agree that nobody likes wasting time. That is why the fast your website will be, the high number of customers you will get.
How to improve your website performance
Having seen why the optimization of your website matters, let’s move to the main agenda of this article. What are some of the things you should optimize to make your website perform better?
Here are 10 things you should consider to optimize the performance of your website.
1. Reduce the number of plugins
For those running WordPress websites, which is very common these days, you should avoid unwanted plugins. That reason: most of the plugins have a lot of junk codes and files.
The time it will take for your website load, all these files and codes may belong, thus affecting its performance. For you to reduce the impact, it is a good practice to uninstall all the plugins you are not using.
Also, try to remove all plugins that take more space in your database. Try to disable some plugins and measure the server performance regularly. That way, you will know which plugin takes a long time to load.
2. Optimize your images
Always keep an eye on the src attribute and also the size of your images. Avoid over-sized images that will take your website much time to load.
Apart from resizing the image, you can use the newly discovered image formats such as JPeg XR and WebP to lower the loading time of images, thereby improving your website performance.
3. Reduce the number redirects
When you have uniform resource locators (URLs) that redirect from your website, the time taken to redirect will be high. While reducing the number of redirects, it is good to ensure that no more than one redirect is used on your website.
Also, reduce the number of subdomains that you are hosting. Lastly, combine all your style sheets into one.
4. Opt for content delivery network (CDN)
CDN is a global network server used to deliver content to users efficiently and effectively. This server will provide content to uses while increasing your website performance.
CDN lower the bandwidth you need to send content, loading time, and also assist in storing content in the cache memory for easy loading.
5. Fix broken links
Broken links result in a bad request on your website. Some bad requests come in the form of error 410/404. When this happens, time is consumed, and you should fix that. Those errors choke search engines, thus ranking your website lowly.
To fix this quickly, run a broken link checker for analysis such as Dead Link Checker, and then do back-end web development to fix the issues.
6. Restrict “hotlinking”
Hotlinking is a way that people use to steal bandwidth. It happens when a specific website directs a link to an image on your website. When hotlinking occurs, the time taken to load pictures is high, thus affecting the performance of your website.
It happens when different websites have links to your website targeting images. That will make your server load slower than usual. This issue can be avoided if you have custom made images regularly
7. Use a caching plugin
Cache plugin monitors what your visitors do. In return, it saves their daily activities and makes them available for the next visitor who is looking for the same services. That cache plugin will make your website more than four times faster make you rank as to perform better websites.
8. Optimize your code
To make your website load fast, make sure that the code is very clean. That can be done by ensuring that your code has no comments and white space. The good thing is, these unnecessary codes can be removed without bringing any effect to your website.
It is good to note that all servers never care how the code may look, provided it has no errors. Try using an open-source tool that helps you write and read web data to excel using C#, therefore making your website light.
9. Categorize your landing pages
Directing visitors to the required pages add economic value to your website. Avoid putting everything on your website home page.
Make sure you have links that direct visitors to other landing pages. On those landing pages, make sure you have a call to action button and contact details.
10. Avoid resizing images in code
As we said earlier, make sure your image is small and resized. But, that does you open your code and start resizing the photos. Make sure you download the images then resize them using software such as Adobe Photoshop or Pixlr.
When your images are optimized, upload them back on to your website. Hopefully, that will reduce the download speed, thus increasing your website performance.
Conclusion
If your website is still slow after following the above tips, you should talk to a website specialist to help you out. What tips would you add to improve your website performance?
This guest blog article was written by Patrick Watt, a content writer who specifically loves to write about business growth, value creation, mergers and acquisitions, finance, content marketing, and self-development. Follow him on Twitter @patrickwattpat.