Increasing Website Performance

Tips for Increasing Your Website Performance

The performance of your website is probably one of its most important aspects. Not only does it affect the overall satisfaction of your visitors but it also significantly affects your bounce. An average visitor expects your page to load within first 2 seconds and soon after that, the abandonment rate starts increasing drastically. By the time you reach 4 seconds, about 25 percent of all your traffic is gone. In other words, if you aim to increase your conversion rate and reduce your bounce rate at the same time, you have to do something with your website’s performance. Here are a few ideas.

Reduce the number of elements on your homepage

One of the things that most commonly affects the overall performance of your website is the number of elements displayed on its homepage. Every single one of these elements needs its own HTTP request which could potentially slow your website down by quite a bit. In order to avoid this happening you will have to prioritize and only leave the elements that are absolutely necessary. This is just one of the reasons why minimalism is getting more and more popular as a website design trend.

Look for a quality server

Another thing you should keep in mind is the fact that not every website performance issue will be caused by something you did. Sometimes, your choice of the server will play a huge part in its future performance, which is why you need to learn a few tips and tricks that will help you find what you are looking for. There are several things you should pay attention to, like FTP access, the amount of web space they offer, as well as the bandwidth allotment your website, will be able to use each day. You might also want to look for some extra features, such as commodities you would receive if you decided to buy domain name from your host.

Image optimization

The use of adequate images is more or less mandatory in the modern world, seeing as how people in 2017 generally hate reading through volumes of plain text. While these images need to be of high quality, this may sometimes slow down your website. Therefore, you might want to do some optimizing beforehand. First, you must choose the right format and currently JPG, PNG and even GIF are the best suited for the job. Next, you might want to go to the Photoshop and reduce its scale. Keep in mind that you only want it to be smaller and not distorted, which is why you must pay special attention to its proportions.

Go with CDN

The omnipresence of the internet in a present-day world makes it seem as if the distance is not a factor that affects its performance. Unfortunately, this isn’t entirely true. In order for your website to perform admirably all over the globe, you need to use a complex Content Delivery Network (CDN) service. This is particularly important if you have a large audience abroad or plan to appeal to international partners.

Minimize the number of plugins

While plugins often add a lot of value to your website, some people simply push this too far. Some platforms like WordPress (WP) boast with about 40,000 free plugins, which makes people completely lose control. In fact, the world record for the most plugins on a single WordPress website is 637. You can only imagine how long it took for this website to load. While you may not be as extreme, even a far smaller number of plugins can sometimes be too much for you to handle. Like what we talked about in the first section, every single one of these plugins makes an HTTP request of its own.

Conclusion

Taking these five steps alone can drastically improve your website performance but there is no reason whatsoever for you to stop here. Using compression, as well as minifying JavaScript, CSS and HTML code are just some additional actions you can take to help your website’s productivity even more. All in all, your work here is never done and the performance of your website mostly depends on the amount of effort and research that you are willing to invest in it.

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