A website is a group of World Wide Web pages that contain links to each other and are made available online by an individual, company, or organization.
Websites enable us to create brand awareness and display the brand to prospective customers. Websites provide reliable information to the consumers that help set business aside from competitors.
Website speed and performance refer to how quickly and efficiently site contents loads and display in a web browser and how proficiently it responds to user interaction.
Suppose a website does not perform efficiently and gets slow to respond to input, which increases the possibility of site abandonment.
To avoid the site abandonment circumstances, we need the best tips to improve website performance for the users.
Why are Website Speed and good performance important?
Fast website speed results in a better user experience, whereas slow-speed websites result in poor experiences for users. If a website has a faster speed, it will enhance and increase the number of usages on its platform.
Website speed is also important for SEO because addressing loading times improves rankings, user experiences, and conversation rate.
Good website performance is needed for accessibility and other website metrics that serve the aims of an organization or business. Good website performance is one of the key determining factors which adhere a user to a webpage.
To get better website performance, web performance optimization is very important. It provides many benefits such as increased conversation rates, search engine rankings, page views, and lower server bandwidth costs.
If a website’s speed and performance take longer than 3 seconds to load, approximately 40% of the visitors will abandon the site and leave this page.
Top website speed optimization techniques
Many factors come into play when a website’s speed comes into play. These factors are the judgment points of how fast a web page loads for a website and are the major website performance factors. Hence optimization plays an important role here. Below are 10 tips to increase the speed of a website.
1. Reducing HTTP requests
HTTP requests are generally used to get different parts of a web browser like images, scripts, style sheets, etc. These requests play an important role in establishing a connection with the server.
Since each web browser has a certain limit of allowing a particular number of HTTP requests, unnecessary requests lead to increased time to load the page.
Usage of CMS like Word Press can remove unwanted plugins because they often execute unnecessary files on the page.
2. Organize and improve Image sizes
Various websites are generally graphic-heavy, and failure to reduce resolution will increase more time for the page to load.
Web development companies specify image sizes before a website design to optimize the graphics’ resolution in the website. Correct file types should also be used for simpler graphics.
3. Content Delivery network usage
The use of CDN or content delivery network service should be essential to minimize mistakes in optimizing file types, graphics, fonts, etc.
Web development companies generally use CDN as third-party services for website optimization so that pages on their website take less time to load and attract more visitors.
CDN uses geographically distributed servers. The server nearest to the visitors will be serving the files. The CDN market has predicted growth of 28% till the year 2025.
4. Mobile-first code
The whole world now is at the fingertips of a mobile device. The website owner should ensure that their websites are being analyzed by an analytics tool.
Generally, web developers test their websites on mobile once they have made sure that their website has been optimized to run fast on the Web. This process often takes time.
Hence mobile optimization for the website should be parallelly done while developing the web page for the internet.
5. Time to First Byte
The time for the server to receive the first data in terms of a byte is called the time to first byte, also known as TTFB. This is generally an important aspect from the server-side this.
We can overall predict the time taken by the webpage to load. Pages are faster made if the server application logic is best optimized. If existing databases are slow, companies need to migrate to faster database systems.
6. Hosting service plan
The web hosting provider should not be shared with other website development companies because it distributes the load between the two servers.
This makes the web page load speed lower and reduces the performance considerably. Hence a proper service hosting plan should be chosen.
7. GZip Compression
This kind of compression helps to reduce the HTTP responses for some particular type of file types. Hence most web development companies use GZip Compression for web page developments.
8. HTML and Javascript files combination
The web page has a general limit of a certain number of requests to be received during parallel processing. More the number of resources will be the speed of the web page to load.
Webpack is one of the most important tools that combine multiple resources to benefit the performance during production deployment.
Minification includes removing and decreasing unnecessary symbols and shortening the javascript and CSS files.
9. Javascript Loading
At times, a webpage can take time to load specific tags from a remote source for rendering with the website. This is an asynchronous process.
Web development companies should set the asynchronous flag on these tags while loading the web page so that the script parsing with the page also happens simultaneously.
10. Plugin reduction
Plugins are tools or functionalities that are reusable for developers and generally used during content management. Plugins come into play while using tools like Word Press.
It enables analytics and comments in addition to the content created. But these plugins can prove costly when optimizing your webpage performance.
Plugins load additional Javascript files and increase the TTFB as it requires additional processing for each request. Hence unless a plugin is necessary, avoid installing them.
Conclusion
A website or a web page performance has a significant impact on the business to improve its revenue. Webpage development trends are becoming more and more useful for us to optimize performance on the internet.
It may sometimes be challenging to improve the speed of a page as sometimes it may become costly to buy a proper hosting service plan. Also, it becomes challenging owing to the diversity of operating systems, browsers, connectivity, and devices.
It is not compulsory to implement all the 10 tips mentioned above at once, but look at what best suits your webpage performance.
More time should be spent on analytics and monitoring how your business webpage is performing so that you can take appropriate steps to optimize the same.
