Your website is your brand digital identity, that’s why you need to make sure all the time that its performance is optimum to retain your customers and enhance their experience. In this article, we will review 8 important tips for improving website performance.
Why is it important to follow the tips for improving website performance?
Following our tips to improve website performance can help support your business in three main aspects; conversion rate improvement, increase website visibility and enhance user experience.
Conversion Rate Increase
Improving your website performance can definitely increase the visitor’s conversion rate. In other words, if your website has a fast-loading time, customers are more likely to make a purchase or take an action like registering for an appointment.
Visibility
Improving your website’s performance can have a great impact on its visibility on search engines. Google takes your website’s loading speed into consideration while ranking it on the search page. Also, your website’s mobile friendliness can affect its visibility and ranking on the SERP.
User Experience
Websites with good performance and fast loading times can guarantee a better user experience and low bounce rate.
What are the tips for improving website performance?
8 tips for improving website performance:
Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN is basically a group of servers that are geographically distributed around the globe. Its main purpose is to store files and data temporarily to make them accessible to users regardless of what their geographical location is.
To have a better understanding of CDN, imagine that you are in Italy, and you want to watch a movie that is stored on a server in the United States. Without using CDN, data would take time to be transferred between the two geographical locations which would result in high loading times and latency. However, what actually happens is that your browser connects to a nearby CDN server that has that movie already stored so that you can enjoy watching your movie without any delays.
Using CDN improves website performance, decreases latency, and enhances user experience.
Choose your web hosting plan and provider!
The performance of your website can be largely affected by your hosting type, plan, and provider. There are three main hosting types:
Choosing the most suitable hosting type for your website depends on several factors such as the expected traffic volume, storage capacity needed, and bandwidth. After reviewing those factors, you will be able to know the specifications you need to look for and choose your plan.
It’s also of high importance to choose your web hosting service provider wisely and to make sure that it has high credibility and good customers reviews.
Enabling Browser Caching
Caching is the process of temporarily saving some of the website’s data on users’ computers. By enabling browser caching, users will experience less loading time on their subsequent visits to the website. Â
Enable GZIP Compression
Enabling GZIP compression can minimize the size of HTTP requests and reduce server response time for certain file types. GZIP compresses the files before sending them to your browser, then your browser can unzip them so that they can be used. Implementing GZIP compression on your website can save up to 70% of the size your files take which can definitely improve your website’s performance.
Reduce the number of plugins!
Plugins are common components of websites, especially WordPress or pre-built websites platforms. Plugins are used to add certain functionality to the websites like analytic tools used by the website management or a comment tool. Unfortunately, each plugin used comes with additional CSS and JavaScript files and consumes some of the resources used by the website to perform well which results in higher loading times.Â
It’s better to review the plugins you use every couple of months and decide which ones are useful and which ones need to be removed to improve the website’s performance.
Images sizes optimization
Using images with high resolution can result in slowing down the website and high page loading time which can affect website performance. Optimizing the image sizes can definitely result in much better performance. You can also look for compressing software which can reduce image size without compromising its quality. Moreover, you can contact your web developer so that they can add codes that adjust the image size according to the user’s display properties.
Reduce the sizes of CSS and JavaScript files!
If your website has so many CSS and JavaScript files, this would result in a high number of requests sent by the user’s browser to access specific files which can cause delays and affect the website’s performance. That’s why it is better to try and combine those files together in 1 file only.
Also, you can try to minify the coding files using minifying software on the internet. This will help remove unnecessary parts from the codes which can make the files much lighter and improve the website loading speed.Â
Eliminate Or Reduce Redirects
Having so many redirects on your website can affect its performance in a negative way. Directs can result in sending too many HTTP requests and slows down your website. It’s better that you run a redirects scan on your website and review them to know which ones can be eliminated entirely from the web pages.
Contact us now at HostSailor and explore our wide range web hosting options.