It's a digitally-driven world today! With the fast-paced internet, users have an insatiable appetite for consuming content without delay. When did you last find a broken link or a "page not found" message, and how did you respond? It's frustrating, right?
No matter how grand your website looks, if the page loads slowly and needs to be more user-friendly, you aren't just losing a visitor. The visitor you just lost in the internet maze could have been a business opportunity, most likely, lost forever.
Nobody likes a website that loads painfully! Statistics tell us anything beyond the 2-3 second limit is enough to pluck page users away. Even the most professional website developers miss the nuances of website optimization.
Data often quoted to show the disastrous impact of slow page load on revenue is this - back in 2006, Amazon found that every 100ms in added page load time cost them 1% in sales. Google says-An extra 0.5 seconds in each search page generation would cause traffic to drop by 20%.
The result is higher bounce rates, low conversion, sinking rankings, and erosion of brand image. All this seriously impacts the customer acquisition journey.
Website optimization- Give teeth to your business to bite more into the digital share!
Most often, it is believed that having a website should be good enough. And it's as easy as buying a commodity today, given the abundance of website development companies offering unbeatable prices. Indeed, it’s imperative to have a website to register an online presence, but it takes more than a functional website to build and sustain a brand image.
If that sounds too much, consider a
situation where your brand’s popularity soars, and the existing website is
unequipped to handle the inflow. Modern marketing maneuvers are all about
getting into the shoes of the customer. Loss of customer loyalty because of a
poor website should pinch a lot!
The solution -your website should be “optimized” to be of any real significance. An optimized website naturally offers a better user experience, is easily visible in search results, and gets things done from satisfied users – a key to business success. It’s time to incorporate website optimization strategies or seek professional website optimization services from a web development company.
So, it’s better to remove deficiencies than damage one’s reputation!
How to go about it?
Having said that, the question is, what do we do about it? Fortunately, several tools and optimization techniques can improve website performance. These performance improvement maneuvers are a sum total of tried and tested methods. These website optimization tips do not follow one size that fits all approach.
It’s a mix-and-match method and measuring outcomes to determine which ones are best suited for your website. There are target issues which are obvious ones like – sizing issues of content (images, videos, and links), the bulkiness of a page (heavy HTML, CSS, or JAVA codes), and some non-obvious ones like server hosting, quietly dragging your website down.
Before you make significant changes, I hope you are smartly creating backups.
Alright, in the article, we will walk you through these website optimization techniques. Stay tuned.
We have neatly bunched the ten best strategies.
1. Have you opted for the right hosting plan?
Website hosting plan is initially selected based on certain premises, two important ones being-traffic it would cater to and budget, and most opt for the cheapest ones.
Sounds good! But one essential point that is often overlooked is that as it accumulates more visitors and handles volumes, it wouldn’t serve well. The sensible way out is to go for a plan upgrade.
You have three different options to pick from and a still newer one:
- Shared hosting
- VPS hosting
- Dedicated server
- Serverless
Let’s quickly go through them. As with anything shared, shared hosting offers the cheapest option.
It’s perfect for a site with low traffic but a big no for high-volume sites. Resources such as disk space,
RAM and CPU are shared between sites hosted on the same server.
With resources split between sharers, it’s not unlikely that the increase in activity in one of them would run your site into trouble. It’s advisable to switch to better options as traffic scales up.
If you aren’t looking for massive investments in your hosting plan and sharing resources is not something you would settle with, go for VPS hosting. It’s a subset of shared hosting with an important tweak. You are still one of the sharers of the resources, but some portion of it is dedicatedly reserved for your site. This exclusivity is a feature of dedicated sharing but comes at the price of a little above shared one. A good bargain!
The above options wouldn’t appeal to those with colossal space requirements and are willing to spend for a separate, private space with greater autonomy on their setup. No prizes for guessing; this makes the dedicated server the costliest of the three options.
The last one is still a recent phenomenon that leverages the cloud-native architecture, which allows developers to build and run applications without managing servers.
Look at your traffic statistics and go for the model that serves you best.
2. What about the images on your website?
Images mean so much! It is said- a picture is worth a thousand words. Those heart-tugging images are an instant connection to the audiences, and the balanced use of photos, images, and graphics on the product boosts engagement.
A survey suggests that 66% of consumers want to see at least three product images before buying. This becomes all the more important when one is running an e-commerce store. The flip side is it isn't pretty as it looks on the inside.
The larger the image size, the heavier the page that carries it, and consequently longer the page load time, slowing down your website on the whole. Images are way larger than HTML files, so they need longer to download and render in the browser.
But whether you are running an e-commerce site or not, the image compression or reduction step is a must-do. We offer a few simple steps to adjust images to improve performance.
- Do not use a lot of images because you can, but use just the right ones.
- Ensure compression of your images before you upload them to the website. Please don't depend on the server's or browser's capability to do it for you, as it's time-consuming. Make use of freely available tools/plugins.
- Make sure you use the correct file type (PNG, GIF, JPG, JPEG, Webp) because the file types can affect file size!
- JPG is the widely accepted format of choice. It allows lossy (image suffers some degree of loss) compression, which isn't detectable to the users but produces files of lesser size, thereby decreasing load time. If you need to preserve your image's finer details or intricate patterns, go for PNG. It's best suited for detailed graphics, logos, screenshots, etc.
Use GIFs for simpler graphics or animated images.
With some delicate balancing between reducing file size and preserving quality, we bet you will be in for a surprise for the gains it offers to website performance. It has been observed that compression to 75% of the original size serves best. Ensure the web development agency you hired pays attention to these details.
3. Flush out excess plugins
Plugins are life savers, no doubt about that. They bring a whole lot of extraordinary functionality to your website. You name a requirement, and there's a plugin for it. There's a plugin for online store creation, taking donations for a cause, adding contact forms, and improving SEO.
Essentially, these are bits of software that do away with the need to write codes manually or edit them. Examples include Adobe Flash Player, a Java virtual machine (for Java applets), QuickTime, and Microsoft Silverlight.
In the wordpress.org repository itself, you will find an overwhelming number of plugins. With 58,000 plugins, WordPress rules the roost in content management systems (CMS) today. Sounds cool, right?
So, where's the problem? Unused plugins mean extra codes on your website, impacting loading times as they load additional CSS and JavaScript files.
Also, some may increase the TTFB (time to first byte) time. Time to first byte (TTFB) is the measurement of the responsiveness of a web server. This hampers the user experience. And as a consequence, the website's performance too.
Nuggets of advice to handle plugins better!
- Keep the number of plugins within reasonable limits. A good count would be anything between 20-30.
- Update plugins as and when the developer provides them to avoid security breaches.
- Incorporate a healthy habit of checking the plugin count every few months. Disable the ones that are no longer in use. If it doesn't mess up your site functionality, uninstall it altogether.
Are you done with the plugins? Let's move ahead.
4. Definitely reduce both your redirects and HTTP requests.
What’s an HTTP request? Each time you click a website or type in the address, the browser sends a request to the server. In response, a whole bunch of data (including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images) necessary to render the webpage is sent to the requesting browser.
As many CSS files, as many requests are sent across to the server. All these files may belong to the same page. Most web pages aren’t simple, meaning many HTTP requests are in motion.
Obviously, this is going to slow down the website’s performance.
The simple rule here is – to reduce the number of HTTP requests. How to implement it practically?
- Use only the most important pictures, content, CSS, Flash, etc., on your webpage.
- Reduce the number of Javascript and CSS files by smartly grouping them.
- If your webpage uses external resources, it means a lot of embedded stuff like images, videos, links, widgets, and font packages that will trigger multiple HTTP requests. This needs to be seen.
Talking about redirects means taking the user to another page. A website using too many redirects can slow it down, affecting performance.
Use handy tools like – Google Search Console to find pages causing redirects and eliminate unnecessary ones. Also, during the design phase, go for a single mobile-friendly design that serves all possible resolutions since mobile devices are more in use.
This would avoid Landing Page Redirects. The user doesn’t like being shifted from this page to that repeatedly. These reductions will undoubtedly improve the site’s loading time.
5. Make use of browser caching
Caching is a crucial step in improving a site’s loading time. By enabling this vital feature, some files of the website, primarily static ones (HTML documents, stylesheets, JavaScript files, and images), are temporarily stored on the user’s computer.
This means, on each subsequent visit, rather than repeating the process all over again, the browser can load the page by fetching it from the user’s cache, allowing gains in time and bandwidth, user experience, and reduced loading times.
The general settings allow you to set up a cache if your website uses VPS or a dedicated server.
6. Go for a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
It's an organized network of high-performing servers spread across the globe that store copies of the website. Typically, a website receives multiple requests from visitors from different places, but the server that takes the hit is usually kept at a single location.
This single server can overwhelm itself by handling requests and sending images, CSS, and JavaScript (static content). This will invariably drag down the website.
By towering the geographical barrier, faster data retrieval is achievable, which has two essential benefits.
- Load on the customer's server availing CDN service is significantly reduced.
- Lower loading times for visitors worldwide for a genuinely international customer experience. Of course, it comes at a premium, but it's worth every bit of money invested.
7. Make sure your website is mobile first
Most often, websites are designed keeping a desktop browser in mind. So, these functional websites aren’t optimized for mobile devices by default.
As mobile technology becomes affordable, with 90% of the global internet population using mobile to go online, businesses must pick up this upward trend in mobile internet adoption.
A mobile-first design from the start means your website is scaling well and fast enough to meet user expectations without risking traffic, customer loyalty, and revenue. It's advisable to rope in a professional app development agency to avoid these pitfalls.
Website optimization for mobile devices serves as the right way forward. Developers and stakeholders should keep this compatibility factor in mind so that the website scales well for popular browsers, browser versions, devices, or platforms in widespread usage.
A RUM (real user monitoring) is a critical performance monitoring tool that gathers real-time transaction data to sketch customer behavior. One can also go for Google Analytics to find users’ ways of connecting to the website. Make sure you are doing this.
8. Opting for a reliable CMS
The importance of a website in the marketing strategy is enormous. It offers a window to the prospective buyer into the seller’s products and their mindset.
A content management system or CMS is the core of a website. Its SEO-friendly features, ease of deployment, user-friendliness, extendable functionality, and wide community support truly empower you to do away with outsourcing and take charge of your website without getting bogged down by technicalities.
9. Is your database optimized?
Your MySQL database tables should be optimized to boost the performance of your website. It’s one of the essential methods to get a decently-performing website.
Typically, if your website uses WordPress or some other CMS that relies massively on database utilization, this vital exercise must be done routinely.
For example, the WordPress CMS stores comments, blog posts, and other information that take up considerable space.
Also, each CMS needs its optimization methods. Based on operational metrics, proactive database monitoring is essential for optimal resource utilization and system performance.
10. Include SEO best practices
Even the best website in the business will struggle to be of any good if people have a hard time finding it. The site should be able to bring organic traffic, a cost-efficient option over huge sums spent on ads.
The search engine is the first resort for a visitor seeking information. If your website isn’t ranking on the first page, chances are you will be losing visitors and impacting business. This is an essential exercise for an enterprise looking to leverage digital marketing services for small businesses and take the digital transformation trajectory. So, it’s important to play around with the algorithms Google uses for ranking content based on keywords.
The indexing takes place, followed by the final ranking of a webpage. Factors like relevant content, freshness, keywords, links, and multimedia help improve rankings. Of course, additional factors like the size of the site and traffic moving on it also have a role in this.
Winding up
We bet you didn’t know all the points on the website optimization checklist. As we discussed in detail here, some of the essential areas one needs to work on will enable better website performance; it should be pointed out here that these are not the only ones out there.
But these are the highly recommended ones by Proquantic.
We agree even with all the website optimization tools available, it can be a challenging balancing task “optimizing” a website on our own and setting right the parameters of conversion, visibility, and usability.
The best way is to do an initial audit and implement those recommendations. We at Proquantic offer website optimization services to ensure your website gets into better shape.
We have been working quietly behind the scenes for enterprises and helping them solidify their online presence, which earns satisfied customers and long-term trust.
And optimization requires consistency if a business wants to stay ahead of the curve and ace the competition. That’s how you bring in more happy customers.
