What Would You Do To Improve Your Site’s Performance

In digital marketing, having a good, well-designed, and responsive website is important as it could determine the success of a business, especially if they rely on digital strategies. But, what would you do to improve your site’s performance? Well, if you have no clue on how to boost your website’s performance, we dive into what is website performance, discuss why it’s important, and talked about the effective methods to improve it below:

What is website performance? 

Website performance refers to how fast a website loads and displays the content. It’s also how smoothly a user interacts with the website as well as whether the user has a good experience while interacting with the website. Website performance is also commonly referred to as page load time.

Why is website performance important? 

Website performance is important as it provides numerous benefits to a business. Here are some of the reasons why website performance is important:

• Increase conversions or sales: A high-performing website will encourage users to stay on the website longer and make a purchase. 
• Good user experience: The overall user experience will be good as customers enjoy spending time browsing your website. 
• Boost search rankings: Search engines prioritize websites with fast loading speeds and mobile-friendly design by ranking them higher on the search results.
• More traffic from mobile users: Since most users tend to use their mobile devices to browse websites, it’s important to ensure the website loads well on mobile. 
• Reduce overall bounce rate: If your website performs well, users will stay on the website longer and explore other website pages, thus, improving the bounce rate.
• Improve website speed: A website that performs well will usually have fast loading speed times, enabling users to perform an action or get what they need quickly.
• Build credibility and trust: If your website performance is good, users will consider your brand to be credible and trustworthy as they are able to navigate your website easily and find what they’re looking for.

What would you do to improve your site’s performance?

There are many ways to improve a website’s performance. Here are some of the recommendations you should do to improve your site’s performance: 

1. Optimize image sizes 

Images, especially high-definition ones, tend to take up a lot of the website’s loading time. So, what you can do to improve your site’s performance is to compress images to reduce their file sizes without having to sacrifice the quality. 

Besides that, you can also consider using different file types such as WebP, which is already compressed without reducing the quality. Try to reduce the number of images within a page as well to make it load quicker.

2. Implement Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are one of the best ways to improve your site’s performance as they can spread content across various global services to provide faster delivery to the users. When the website serves content from the nearest server to the user, it helps to speed up access and reduce the latency.

Some of the popular CDN providers are Cloudflare and KeyCDN where they improve a site’s performance while also boosting the user experience at the same time.

3. Ensure the site is mobile-responsive

Mobile performance is important as most users will browse websites through mobile devices. It’s more important now than ever to ensure your website works well across multiple screen devices and loads quickly. 

Design your website to make it easy for users to navigate on mobile devices by organizing the navigation menu or the layout. Consider using an AMP version of your website for mobile users.

4. Minify the CSS, HTML, and Javascript files

Another way to improve your site’s performance is to minify the HTML, Javascript or CSS by removing the unnecessary objects within the code. This includes comments, spaces, and line breaks. Though it is useful for coders, it could be unnecessary for machines to read them. 

Minifying the codes helps to reduce the overall file size and allows website browsers to read your website faster. 

5. Reduce HTTP requests 

HTTP requests are requests made from the website browser to the server. This means that the browser will send an HTTP request to the website’s server to request information or data. Then, the server will send the information back to your browser to display the content. 

Some of the ways to reduce HTTP requests would be to optimize the CSS and Javascript files as well as reduce the image sizes by using tools such as TinyPNG. 

6. Use web browser caching 

You can consider using a browser cache which temporarily stores the data and saves the resources in their cache. Once the users return to the website, the data that was saved by the browser cache will be used instead of having to re-download them. 

Most of the content management systems like WordPress will have several plugins that create a cache. 

7. Ensure your web hosting is reliable

Take a look at your web hosting provider and see whether the hosting plan is suitable for your website. If your website starts to slow down and experience frequent downtime, it might be a sign that your web hosting server plan needs an upgrade.

Consider opting for dedicated hosting or VPS just for your website instead of shared hosting as it can slow down your website. 

8. Reduce the number of redirects 

Redirects will actually add more HTTP requests and slow down your website. It’s best to reduce the redirects to improve your site’s performance. This is because the browser will request data from the server multiple times instead of just once. 

You can remove the website pages that aren’t necessary instead of redirecting them. You can also just direct the links to the correct destination without having the pages redirect. 

9. Fix any broken links 

If you have any broken links, it could negatively impact your site’s performance. A broken link happens when a user clicks on the link and it leads to a page not found such as the common ‘404 error’. This usually happens because the page doesn’t exist anymore or the URL was changed.

To fix the broken links and improve your site’s performance, you can perform a link audit frequently to spot any broken links using tools such as Google Search Console. You can also include 301 redirects to direct users from the broken links to the correct page. 

Conclusion

So the next time you ask someone, ‘what would you do to improve your site’s performance?’, you can provide some recommendations to them after reading this article. It’s crucial to ensure your site’s performance is working well to retain visitors and gain new visitors that could potentially turn into actual paying customers. Explore ways on how you can improve your website speed with our handy guide.