While online customers provide you with the most lucrative business growth opportunity, they’re also the most challenging lot to please. A simple mistake such as a slow website performance is enough to make you lose a potential customer. A slow-loading website is a big turn-off to your customers because those milliseconds make a huge difference in customer behavior.
If you want to attract more customers and retain the existing ones, you have to carry out a website performance test. Website performance is at the core of your customer experience, and you must ensure optimal performance at all costs. Here are seven recommended ways to improve your site performance.
- Optimize Website for Mobile Quality and Speed
Do you know that more than 55% of internet traffic originates from mobile devices? More customers are browsing using their mobile devices, which means there’s an urgent need to optimize your website for mobile performance. You need to ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
You need to code your site for mobile users first before you proceed to the tablets and desktop. Check website performance for mobile usability. You should also make your site readable on all devices, optimize for SEO, and enhance usability.
- Choose a Better Host for Your Website
If you’re wondering why your website is running slow, then the issue could be your host. Think about the kind of host you’re using. Is it shared hosting, Virtual Servers (VPS), or a dedicated server?
The cheapest, fastest, and most popular hosting is a shared one. It isn’t the quickest web host because you’ll be sharing disk space, CPU, and RAM with other sites.
Virtual Private Servers are much faster than shared hosting because they distribute content using multiple servers. Although you’ll share your servers, you still have your own part in the virtual server, and your configuration won’t affect others. It’s a perfect web host for websites that receive average traffic or your traffic spikes at some point.
Finally, you can go for a dedicated server which is the most expensive. It gives you the freedom to make your own physical hosting server. You’ll pay server rent and have a system administrator oversee its maintenance.
- Conduct Website Performance Test and Create Benchmarks
Your website is the backbone of all your operations, and you must ensure it’s performing as it should by carrying out website performance monitoring. It’s what gets and sends HTTP requests and responses to the right servers. A poor-performing server will not get your website the maximum benefit and the optimization efforts.
Check and test the servers constantly to determine how they’re performing and solve any issues you come across. There are many tools you can use to analyze and monitor your traffic. The tools will help point out various problems in your website that you won’t notice quickly.
You can utilize heatmaps to improve performance of your website. Heatmaps provide a visual representation of how each page on your website performs. You’ll then know whether your website is providing a good customer experience by answering visitors’ queries.
- Resize Your Website Images
While eye-catching images attract customers, they can also slow down your site. Good images, videos, and graphics can increase your engagement. But this won’t be the case if the files are too large because they’ll only overpower your site.
You can use different tools to reduce the size of your images without interfering with their quality. You can also use HTML-responsive images to adjust the dimensions of your images based on the display properties of the user. Consider adopting the right image formats such as Jpeg XR and WebP, which reduces the weight by up to 50% without affecting the quality.
- Consider Using Cloud-Based Website Monitoring
Offloading your site monitoring to a cloud-based host is a perfect way to increase performance. Using a cloud-based host has many advantages, including ensuring increased efficiency, scalability, and freeing up your time so you can focus on running your business. With a cloud-based host, you can monitor your website from anywhere at any time.
The cloud-based host informs you immediately your site goes down. You can also load test your website and determine the exact time your site started going down. With website performance metrics, you get the chance to act swiftly in case of a problem and solve it immediately.
- Reduce the Number of Plugins in Your Webpage
Plugins are common in websites and are vital because they add features from third parties. However, more plugins are bad news as they can slow down the performance of the site. You’ll need to load more resources which means your website will load at a slower rate.
The number of plugins continues to grow every day, and you can’t ignore some. The best thing to do is get rid of the ones you no longer use.
Check all your plugins and delete the unnecessary ones. You can also run a performance test to find the plugins that are slowing down your site.
- Reduce the Number of JavaScript and CSS Files
Too many JavaScript and CSS files lead to many HTTP requests when your visitor wants to access the files. Every request is treated individually by the web visitor’s browser, which will slow down your website. Reduce the number of CSS files and JavaScript to improve performance.
You can also consider grouping all your JavaScript files into one and do the same for your CSS files. If you do this, the number of HTTP requests will reduce. There are many tools you can use for that, including Grunt tools and Minifier.
Analyze Website Performance Now
Your website traffic relies a lot on the performance of your site. Visitors are so impatient, and any site that doesn’t meet the three seconds load time will lose a lot of traffic and potential customers. Carry out a website performance test and find out what’s causing the low speed.
Also, remember that your site’s primary purpose is to improve traffic. All the bells and whistles aren’t necessary if they’re not adding any value. Consider implementing the above points to ensure your site is running as it should.
If you need more help optimizing your website for performance, we’re here to help. Go through our site for more educative content.