How to Increase Your Website Performance?

The performance of your website really matters as it creates a positive or negative impression of your brand. Your websites are visited often, regardless of where the product is purchased from. Thus, your website should be easy to navigate, user-friendly and mobile responsive.

Most of the times in the process of building a website, we tend to focus on bigger things like web design, content, marketing of the site and building its online presence. What we really miss out in this process, is keeping up your website’s performance. As a matter of fact, the speed of your website is an important aspect for running a successful website. For any website owner, website performance should always be on top priority. Any website that performs faster has better user engagement, higher SEO rankings, higher conversion rates and more. But it needs a lot of optimization which we will see in this article. We will cover all the key practices, tips and tools that will help you enhance your website’s performance.

Here are 8 tips to Increase Your Website Performance

HTTP Requests Reduction

The more the HTTP requests, the slower your page loads. A web browser can handle only a limited number of simultaneous connections to a single host. To avoid any obstacles, the number of individual pages are decreased with the help of consolidation whereas, the tinier files like images are put together into one file.

This cuts down the number of HTTP requests and simultaneously, the number of round trips that are required to load your website. Reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on improvising your website’s performance.

File Compression

All the web pages are built using codes such as HTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc. As the webpage functionality grows, the code files get complex and all this ultimately affects their load times. The file compression reduces code files up to 80% and therefore, increases the response time of your website.

301 Redirects

Avoid redirects whenever possible as they are the performance killers. It brings about more round-trip times and thus, immediately leads to an increase in the load time of the HTML file.

Web Caching Optimization

To reduce the server load, latency and bandwidth usage, web caching optimization needs to be done. CDNs are popular web caching software to save copies of files passing through their system. The browser cache plays an important role here, as the max time of 7 days is recommended to have. As a result, it saves the time of the server and makes things entirely faster.

Image Optimization

Optimize the images before you upload them to your website. The high-quality images are too heavy which can slow down the performance of your website. Use tools like JPEGmini, TinyPNG, Kraken.io, etc. that help you compress your images without affecting the quality of the image.

 

SSL Certificate/ HTTPS

Google gives priority to those sites that have SSL installed. They even penalize those sites which don’t have this certificate installed. Secure websites also help in search engine rankings. Therefore, an SSL certificate also plays an important role in the performance of your website

Optimize CSS and JavaScript

A poorly written CSS will increase in page load time which leads to the poor user experience. Thus, your CSS code should be well-structured and clean.
Functionality rich websites use JavaScript to build the sites. A poorly structured or complex JavaScript can impact on the website’s performance. A blank screen may appear to the user, if the page doesn’t load correctly because of the Javascript.

404 Errors

Missing files give a 404 HTTP error. If any of your web pages return 404 HTTP error, it can be due to some issue on your server. Try and fix the 404 errors on your website, if any.

Some Useful Tools to Measure Your Website’s Performance

GTMetrix

GTMetrix is a tool that analyses the front-end of your website and checks if it follows the best practices. It provides you the results through grades from F to A. This tool also recommends how to optimize your website based on the results.

PageSpeed

This tool analyses the content and some important components of your website such as CSS, JavaScript and Image performance. This tool is provided by Google and it grades both the desktop and mobile site speeds.

SeoSiteCheckup

Instantly analyzes your website’s SEO and speed issues, displays your competitor’s whereabouts and suggests which optimization techniques to use for your website to improve its performance.

Pagelocity

Along with SEO(Search Engine Optimization) performance, Pagelocity also looks into social metrics and the way they are affecting your social visibility. The general page speed performance and specific tips on how your website portions can be optimized.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a paid tool, but the features available with this tool are worth the price you pay. A variety of plans are available, but the basic plan is also sufficient to get you the data for enhancing the performance of your website.

Closure

Most of the internet users prefer a faster loading website. They instantly switch to another website, if they find your website is not fast. It means you are likely to lose your potential customer, if your website performance is low.
Always remember, the faster the website, the better the user experience thus, directly contributing to you and your visitors benefit at the same time.
If you also have some other website techniques to boost a website’s performance, do share in the comment section below.