How to Optimize a Website for Better Performance?
In today’s digital landscape, millions of websites compete for visitors’ attention, each serving a unique purpose. To ensure your website rises above the noise, you must focus on performance and optimization. Without these, even the most dedicated efforts can fall short. Below are key factors to consider that will help your website distinguish itself from the crowd, attract more visitors, and foster deeper engagement.
Mobile First Site
Mobile users are increasing rapidly. According to January 2018 data, the mobile population amounted to 3.7 billion unique users globally. As of February 2017, mobile devices accounted for 49.7 percent of web page views worldwide, with mobile-first markets such as Asia and Africa leading the pack (Source). People love to do almost everything online using their smart devices. So you should consider developing your site for mobile-first quality and speed. It will help you reach more potential visitors and more engagement too.
Optimize Your Images
According to the HTTP Archive, 61 percent of a website’s page weight on a desktop computer is images. Make sure that your images are appropriately sized. Don’t use unnecessarily large images on your website. It will make the site load slower and increase the website loading speed.
New image formats, such as WebP or JPeg XR, can help reduce image weight by 20 to 50 percent without sacrificing quality.
Minify CSS and Javascript
Using inline CSS and Javascript is a bad practice. It makes your HTML code weigh more and more difficult to manage. Moreover, HTML code won’t be cached. In order to avoid these problems, use minified CSS and Javascript. That way, it will be easier to cache those files easily and the files will be manageable.
Increase Site Speed with Caching
Caching is a great solution to reduce bandwidth and improve web performance. If you enable caching on your website, a visitor will see the cached version unless it has changed since the last cache. Caching saves server time and makes things faster. So make sure this feature is enabled on your site! Prefetching will also improve your visitors’ browsing experience. Memcached, Redis, and Varnish are some popular caching solutions for websites.
Compress file
Use compressed file for better web performance. There is a popular and commonly used file compression method named Gzip. It will compress all the documents, audio files, PNG images, and other files that are not already shrunk yet. It makes web contents lightweight and easily manageable.
Choose a High Performing Hosting Provider
Choosing a reliable and responsive hosting provider will ensure lifetime happiness for you. A good hosting provider will always be ready to help you resolve any issue related to their services. Therefore, choosing a good hosting provider is a must. Some reliable and high performing hosting providers are Bluehost, HostGator, SiteGround, Hostinger etc.
Reduce HTTP request
Basically, an HTTP request happens when a browser asks for something from the server. It can be a stylesheet, an image or a file. Everything a website is made up with has individual HTTP request. Unless the browser gets the requested file, visitors won’t get it. So as many HTTP requests a browser has to make will make the site load for a longer time. No one wants to wait for a longer time to load a site. So you will get a higher bounce rate on your website. To avoid this unwanted happening, it’s better to reduce HTTP requests.
Use CDN
CDN (Content delivery network) can help you deliver content faster and efficiently to your targeted audience based on a geographical location. You will get potential traffic and more engagement to your website or content easily. CDN will also significantly improve speed and web performance of your website too! Cloudflare, Amazon’s AWS, EdgeCast/Verizon, Incapsula, MaxCDN are some popular CDN nowadays.
Use a Suitable Framework for your Website
You should choose a suitable framework for your website according to your business niche. If you are a blogger, a simple CMS will work well for you. You don’t need to use any framework that you can’t manage yourself. If you have an e-commerce site you can choose Rails, Shopify, Magento etc. So choose a suitable platform for your website according to your necessity.
Following this guide, you can definitely speed up and improve your website performance. To read more tech blogs, stay with Nascenia.
Contributor: Fatema Tuz Zohra, Nascenia
More to Explore
The Quest for Knowledge Continues. Fuel Your Curiosity.
