9 Effective Ways to Improve Your Website's Performance

The Internet is not that different from the real world. In both worlds, speed is everything. But what differs the Internet from the real world is that on the internet, customers are won or lost in just a fraction of a second.

The worst case here is that there are website owners who misconstrue slow page loads as the result of a slow internet connection. But what they don’t know is that the culprit behind the slow page load is the website itself.

Do a few seconds hurt?

A BIG YES FOR THAT.

Page load time can greatly affect your user experience and your site’s ability to convert visitors into buyers or leads.

A one-second delay in page load time yields:

• 11% fewer page views
• 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
• 7% loss in conversions

A few extra seconds could have a huge impact on your website's performance and your ability to engage visitors and make sales. It’s an undeniable fact that high-performing websites have a higher SEO ranking, which in turn brings in more visitors and a higher conversion rate. Website speed is one of the factors that many search engines use in their ranking algorithms.

To help you achieve and maintain a high-performing website, we have listed here 9 ways you can make improvements to your site. Please read on!

Cleaner Code for Better Performance

Try writing cleaner code. Do so by reducing the lines of code as much as you can, optimizing database queries, using design patterns, and avoiding recursion. Structured and readable code always pays off. It increases the maintainability of your website and decreases HTTP overload, all of which will greatly enhance your website's performance.

2. Minify Resources

"Minify" is a verb from programming that means removing unnecessary code from a CSS or JavaScript file. Minifying code is an excellent way to improve web page performance. It helps speed up your page's loading, making visitors and search engines happy.

Minify your code by removing:

• Whitespace characters
• New line characters
• Comments
• Block delimiters

These types of characters help make the code readable, but they are not necessary for the code to execute properly.

3. Reduce the Image Size

Words can be powerful, but pictures create greater impact. And that’s why websites are heavily dependent on graphics, but If your images are not compressed, it will slow down your website’s performance.

The higher the resolution the image has, the larger its file size is. Large images can slow down your website’s page speed. This hurts your users’ experience and, eventually, your search engine ranking.

So how do you maintain high website performance without taking down those images?

Optimize those images.

Image optimization is the process of reducing the file size of your images as much as possible while still maintaining good quality so that your page load times remain low.

To make a long story short, optimizing images means saving your image in a web-friendly format.

Here’s how to optimize images for the web:

• Name your images simply and appropriately.
• Optimize your alt attributes carefully.
• Reduce the file size of your images.
• Choose the right file type.
• Optimize your thumbnails.
• Use more modern formats, such as WebP.

4. Code your Site for Mobile-First Quality and Speed

Making your website mobile-friendly is no longer optional. In fact, Google considers "mobile-friendly websites"  one of the factors in ranking websites and punishes websites that aren’t optimized for smartphones and tablets.

If you’re creating a new website or redesigning an old one to meet the latest Google algorithm updates, the strategy is to code for mobile users first and then progressively enhance the experience for tablets and desktops.

5. Cache as Much as Possible

CACHE. Does it ring a bell? You’ve probably heard this term before. So, what is Web Caching?

Every browser has a cache, which is a place to store local copies of resources such as images, HTML documents, and other elements that make up a web page.

Caching allows the browser to store data such as the logo or a style sheet. When your user revisits or refreshes the web page, they already have many of the items needed to make up the page, improving website performance. Since the data stored in the browser does not have to be downloaded again, This saves server time and makes things altogether faster.

6. Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests

What is an HTTP request?

HTTP is a request-response protocol that allows the fetching of resources, such as HTML documents.

Web pages consist of many elements that must be downloaded: images, style sheets, scripts, flash, etc. In order to download each of these files, we send separate HTTP Requests, wait for a response, and only then can we use certain elements to render the web page. So the more files you have on your website, the more HTTP requests your user’s browser will need to make. The more HTTP requests, the slower the page loads.

How do I reduce HTTPS requests?

Here's a blog with helpful information on how to do so

7. Optimize CSS and JavaScript

Writing clean and well-structured CSS code is a big deal when it comes to website performance. A poorly written CSS will increase page loading time, which leads to a poor user experience.

Here's a blog on how to optimize CSS.

JavaScript is every front-end developer's best friend when it comes to creating interactive, functionality-rich websites and fast, seamless web applications. As with CSS, JavaScript should be written with caution. Poorly written or complex JavaScript can negatively affect website performance.

Third-Party Javascript

Most websites today are very dependent on third-party plugins or features: social media, chat features, commenting services, information feeds, and others. Though this adds useful features to your site, it could also be your downfall when it comes to your website's performance.

How do I avoid this? The technique is to load the third-party JavaScripts asynchronously. Doing so won’t affect your entire website in the event of a third-party crash. Async loading can also speed up page loads.

8. Enable G-zip Compression

One of the fastest ways to increase page loading speed is to use Gzip compression.

"Gzip is a method of compressing files or making them smaller for faster network transfers."

When someone enters your site, a request is sent to your server to deliver the requested file. The larger these files are, the longer it will take to load. Compressing your web pages and CSS before sending them over to the browser will reduce the loading time of your website.

Gzip compression is a great help in web development because HTML and CSS files use a lot of repeated text and spaces. We recommend enabling Gzip compression as a standard practice because it can reduce page size by up to 70%.

9. Your Hosting

If you did everything mentioned above yet are still struggling with your web performance, then try checking with your hosting provider. Web hosting is often overlooked as one of the culprits behind a slow page load.

What Makes Website Hosting a Vital Factor?

Every time you browse through a site and try to load a page, you are necessarily running programs and accessing files from the web server (a remote computer). If that web server is fast enough, the web page that you are trying to access will also load quickly.

Shared and Dedicated Hosting

In shared hosting, you are sharing a server with other companies. The more websites sharing the same server, the slower the website speed will be. Hosting companies even made known the downfall of shared hosting. For higher website performance, consider upgrading to a dedicated plan where you have sole access to the server.

Upgrading your hosting plan can have a positive impact on your website’s page load speed.

Creating a website is easy, but if you want to reach the top online, be prepared to do a lot of hard work.