How to Boost Your Website Performance for the Optimal User Experience?
Why Is Your Website Slow?
You may have built a beautiful website with outstanding features only to find that it is not performing well. There could be several factors responsible for a slow website, such as the server load time, lack of proper performance insights, and image size. Google recommends three seconds as the ideal loading time. Most websites fail to pass this test.
Is Website Performance Important?
Website performance is integral to gaining and retaining customers. Even seconds can make millions of customers lose interest in your site, and they may not come back again. If customers are valuable, so is website performance. Here are five different ways in which you can boost it:
Prioritize Mobile Phone Users: When creating a website, you must keep in mind that you are likely to have more mobile phone users than desktop users. That is why it should be mobile responsive from the start. You should ask your website developer to code for mobile users first because they will be your largest customers and then move on to coding for desktops and tablets. It will help to satisfy your users and also reduce unnecessary dependencies on your site. To ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, you can also take a test in Google's Mobile Website Auditor. It has several criteria such as text readability, viewpoint configuration, plugins, and so on that will determine how good your site is on mobile phones.
Switch to Dedicated Hosting Services: Quite often, web hosting services affect website speed. It generally happens due to shared hosting. A shared hosting account is cheaper than dedicated hosting because it requires you to share server space with other companies. However, doing this affects the website speed because of the number of people using the servers at the same time. That is why switching to a dedicated hosting account may boost the performance of your website.
Switch to Cloud-Based Monitoring: Cloud-based monitoring is becoming increasingly popular these days due to several reasons. It is cost-effective, efficient, and also scalable. With an excellent cloud service, you can check your network at all times, even without physical infrastructure. You can focus more on your business and ensure its optimal performance at all times. You will be notified whenever your hosting service goes down. You will also receive notifications on your phone from time to time. In case of issues, you can quickly perform a load test and fix it.
Minimize HTTP Request and Combine Files: HTTP requests are individually made for the different sections of a page, including its scripts, images, and other media files. Downloading these elements takes up the majority of the load time. Thus, reducing the number can improve your website's loading speed. The best way to do this is to combine all the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Doing this reduces the overall number of files as well as the size of each file. At the same time, compress and reduce all those files that are larger than 150 bytes. You can also reduce your codes by removing extra spaces, indentations, and line breaks within them. Reducing codes will improve your site's performance to a great extent. Ask your web developer for reducing the website code, if you have one, else hire a web developer freelance for the proper optimisation of website code.
Switch to Asynchronous Loading for JavaScript and CSS Files: There are two different ways of loading JavaScript and CSS scripts, namely synchronous loading and asynchronous loading. In the case of synchronous loading, the scripts load one at a time, and the next one does not load until the previous file has fully loaded. The process takes time and affects the load time. In the case of asynchronous loading, however, many of the scripts load simultaneously instead of loading individually. Further, it does not matter if the elements of a page have fully loaded. The other elements continue to load simultaneously without adding to the load time. Your web developer will help you out in switching to asynchronous loading of JavaScript as well as CSS files.
Following these above given steps will help you in boosting your website performance. Also read how to handle increasing costs during web development.
