In this age of ultra-fast internet and connectivity, visitors are the most impatient beings and they are not going to wait any longer for your website to load. Performance and speed go hand in hand, and even a fraction of a second difference in download speeds between two websites goes a long way in driving customers to them. While many think that slow website speed is due to flaws in the construction of the website, one of the main reasons behind it is that there is too much stuff packed into it. Therefore, the first thing to look at is to fix all internal technical problems, reduce your content and do it as quickly as possible. Take a look here at some of the essential ways to optimize the performance of your website.
#1 Strike a balance between website elements
Most of you want something extraordinary on your site to make it as attractive as possible. But remember, with all those out-of-the-box features like a moving background or parallax web scrolling, they’re great as long as they don’t hinder your site’s loading speed. Therefore, the key point is to decide which of all the elements are crucial to the user experience and get rid of the extra features that in no way contribute to improving the core user experience.
#2 Make the website mobile friendly
Looking at the relevance and dominance of mobile phones these days, you need to make sure that your business website works well on mobile screens as well. You should ask your developers to run a mobile-friendly test for your website that explores its usability criteria, plugins, text readability, responsiveness of clickable elements, and everything else.
#3 Do not save large image files
You know what, according to HTTP Archives, almost 60 percent of the weight of a web page on the desktop depends on its image content. Therefore, you need to make sure that you are using high-quality but size-optimized images for each web page of your website. Image formats like WebP, JPeg XR are known to optimize the weight of images by 20-50% without compromising quality.
#4 Rationalization of the number of HTTP requests
While HTTP is nothing more than a request or response protocol implemented by web browsers to get files directly from the server, decreasing HTTP requests is actually a great measure to reduce load time.
#5 Using an effective CDN
CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a composite system that uses various numbers of distributed servers to deliver websites and various web page content depending on the location of the users and the nature of the website. Mostly static website content files which can be CSS, JavaScript files or images are delivered to the web servers that are very close to the users. This is because less proximity ensures less charging time.
Most website owners feel that they need “bells and whistles” to get customers into their websites. But they forget that no matter how attractive their sites are, customers will fly away if they don’t load fast. So, before your website’s ancillary elements and some outdated skins start hindering your speed and performance, get them fixed by your developers.