How to Optimize Website Performance

In today’s world where digital platforms have taken over everything and have increased the speed of every business, it doesn’t matter if you have a good-looking website if it takes a long time to get loaded. If people have to wait till your web pages load, then they will turn towards your competitors. And this is the main reason why website speed optimization has become such a big thing in today’s date and time. There are multiple reasons why your business site may load slowly, but no matter what the cause is, there are various techniques available in the market to help improve your website speed and performance. In this blog, we are going to discuss such tips that can help you optimize your website’s performance.

What is Web Optimization?

Website optimization is a simple process of using advanced strategies, tools, and experiments to improve the performance and speed of the website. When the website is properly optimized it drives more traffic, increases conversions, and helps in growing the revenue of your business. One of the most important aspects of website performance optimization is search engine optimization (SEO). The is a technique that not only focuses on getting the website pages rank higher in the SERPs but enables everyone to find your brand easily. Besides this, here is on-page optimization, which is another important aspect of this process. It ensures that all the internet users that land on your website have the best user experience and tries to convert them into a lead for your business. This proves that by optimizing your website, you can easily tap into an untapped market and can open doors to more conversions that eventually help you gain more revenue.

Why is Website Optimization Necessary?

Web performance optimization is important because it helps website visitors be more successful with their visits. Every website visitor that comes to your site with some queries or questions, can easily find a solution to their problem if the website is properly optimized. Web optimization is something that makes it easier for your visitors to get what they are looking for.

According to web development experts from TatvaSoft, if you have an eCommerce website that sells footwear, you can take the help of a software development company to optimize your website and increase the number of purchases.

This can be done with the help of a conversion rate optimization approach, which is completely focused on systematically a/b testing. This means that different parts of your website are tested and with the help of the test results the development team can increase the conversion rate.

When you optimize the site, it becomes more effective for your business which eventually helps in increasing the revenue for your business through new leads or sales.

Top 9 Tips to Optimize the Website Performance

Here are some of the best techniques that software development company follows to optimize the website’s performance:

1. Image Optimization

Nowadays, to make the website more interesting, developers use heavy graphics. And this may slow down the page speed of the website. If the images are not compressed, or if the images on the site have too high resolution it can result in the performance of the website. For instance, sometimes websites use images with 2x or 3x resolution to have a high-density display. But if the website visitors are not using a HiDP display, then all your work is wasted and the increased loading times for your visitors will make the visitors uninterested. Therefore, the developers must start learning and practicing different ways to optimize images, as it is very crucial. There is an MDN guide that helps the development team make all the images more responsive. Besides, if multiple multiple image sizes are specified, it will allow the web browser to choose the appropriate image as per the screen resolution. So, when you are priming the right size image on all the devices then it means that your images are optimized. Shopify is a site that will guide you properly for this.

2. Reduce HTTP Requests

An HTTP request is something that is used by the web browser to fetch different parts of the web page, like stylesheets, scripts, and images from a web server. Each request that is used to fetch data will have some overhead in creating a connection between the remote user server and the web browser, especially the request using HTTP/1.1. But the web browsers have a limit on the parallel network requests, so if more requests are queued up on your site then some of these requests will be blocked and it will eventually slow down the site. So the first thing to do is eliminate unnecessary requests.

Therefore, if your site is not working as it needs to be, then ask your development team to find out the unnecessary requests, eliminate them, and load only the necessary ones. Besides this, you must also remove any unnecessary JavaScript files, images, stylesheets, fonts, and more. And if you are using a CMS platform like WordPress, then remove any unnecessary plugins that take more time to load. This will optimize the website and make it more flawless.

3. Use CDN (Content Delivery Network) for Better Website Performance

When static files are served, it can be a bit tricky as it is not the primary business of 99% of websites. Therefore, outsourcing this part of the infrastructure is the best option. You can hire the best outsourcing software development company that offers services like Content Delivery Networks or CDN. The CDN tool helps in optimizing the delivery of static files like images, CSS, JavaScripts, and fonts. CDN simplifies the files in a very simple manner. The content delivery network uses geographically distributed servers, which means that the server closest to the site’s visitor will be serving the files. Generally, for all the serving static files from your servers, the website loading time increases whenever the user is far from the server. Therefore, you can use Sematext Experience to handle and monitor the file’s performance that is hosted on CDNs. This can help you measure whether outsourcing is the best option for you or not.

4. Switch to HTTP/2

As mentioned above, HTTP/1.1 is used to send many requests. HTTP is nothing but a protocol that the web browser uses to communicate with the chosen remote server. Therefore, all the files and resources like stylesheets, JavaScript, and images of your website are transferred using this protocol. So, the best way to solve this issue is to reduce the number of requests. As there will be fewer resources to render, the website will load all the pages faster than expected. Besides this, another option is to switch your website to HTTP/2. HTTP/2 comes with many advantages and features that can be more beneficial than HTTP/1.1. Therefore, switching to HTTP/2 can help in avoiding the overhead of multiple requests.

5. Reduce Time to First Byte

Time to first byte (TTFB) is nothing but the time that is taken by the browser to collect the first byte of data from the web server. This is known as a server-side concern but it also plays an important role in improving the website performance and it also improves the speed of the site. One of the main factors in TTFB is the server processing time. Therefore, the software developers must follow some of the tips that Google’s developers recommend to improve TTFB:

  • Optimize how the server migrates to a better and faster database system.
  • Optimize the server’s app logic to make the pages load faster.
  • Upgrade the hardware of the server to get more memory.

6. Select the Best Hosting Plan to Increase Websites’ Speed

This combines with the above-mentioned point of minimizing TTFB. The website owner who is using the service of a shared web hosting provider, that the chances of the website performance being subpar are more. Therefore, one must always look for an upgrade hosting plan or if using WordPress then one must use a managed service that can provide high-performance hosting and stability. But, consider measuring the website performance before making any switch.

7. Write Mobile-First Code

Nowadays, mobile devices have taken over the market. Everyone prefers to have everything on their mobile phone to easily access all the important things. Even online businesses can easily start their brand’s marketing campaign with the use of social media platforms through mobile phones. Therefore, every developer must check what the users of his client’s site are using RUM solutions like Sematext Experience or any other tools for. The reason behind doing this is that normally developers have the practice to create and test the websites on their PC and later they optimize it for mobile devices. This is a tedious process. So, if they write and test the websites on the mobile device first, then the mobile experience would be by default optimized. And then optimizing the websites for the desktop will be straightforward.

8. Reduce Plugins to Optimize Website Performance

Plugins are nothing but reusable pieces of different functionalities that are used in content management systems like pre-build website platforms or WordPress. Plugins can offer additional functionalities to the website like analytics or comment options on the blog. But all these plugins are too costly and each plugin loads additional JavaScript and CSS files which increases the website load and affects the website performance. Besides this, it also increases the TTFB time which requires more processing on the server for each and every web page request. Therefore, using fewer plugins or reducing the current plugins is the best thing to do in order to speed up the site.

9. Load JavaScript Asynchronously

When the web browser reaches a <script> tag, it loads the JavaScript from a remote source and it will wait for the different files to be loaded before rendering the site. This entire process is known as synchronous loading. And if the developers set the async flag on the <script> tag, then they can enable the browser to load the script asynchronously.

Conclusion

As seen in this blog, improving website performance can be difficult when there is a vast difference in browsers, devices, connectivity, and operating systems. But all these things can directly affect your business if it completely relies on your website for reaching your customers. Therefore, one must make sure that the site has the best features and offers the perfect results at a frequent second. For this, the software development company can help business owners optimize their website’s speed and make it better than ever before.

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