You may have the best products and provide the most dedicated service in your market. You may show them on a classy, professional and appealing website with copy that’s engaging and motivational.
It’s a great position to be in!
But if the website pages are slow to display, you’ll drive people away. Sure, you may be prepared to wait a couple of minutes for each of your own website's pages to display … but your average Joe visiting from Google will be clicking the back button after just a few seconds of looking at a blank screen.
Your basic web stats may show hordes of visitors, but they don’t contact you. Something is wrong.
Look deeper into the reports and you’ll see higher bounce rates and less engagement. If that isn’t bad enough, search engines actually penalize slow websites, hitting rankings and restricting their profile as a result.
So whether you're running a small business or a large enterprise, you need to optimize your website’s performance if you want to stay competitive.
And don’t say you haven’t got the resources to do it! There are a number of relatively simple ways to address website speed issues. So let’s look at some of them.
1. Review Your Hosting Plan
Shared hosting is a very popular and cost effective option, and take-up is forecast to grow by 15% a year for the foreseeable future.
But of course, with its low cost, it comes with the most limited resources. If you're struggling to cope with an increased traffic load, you may want to think about upgrading to VPS or cloud hosting. The VPS market is expected to exceed $8 billion in the next two years.
And if you really want to go to town, the Holy Grail is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This will host static assets like images and deliver them independently from your own server, usually from locations closer to your users. There are many providers of CDNs out there, and instead of recommending any ourselves, we’ll just point you to
TechRadar, who review this kind of thing and update it periodically.
2. Optimize CSS and JavaScript
Minifying cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript files is another way to optimize web performance. This involves eliminating unnecessary spaces, characters, comments, line breaks and other elements.
Then (obviously) the server doesn't need to process them. The website loads faster because there isn’t as much data to transmit.
The best way to do this is to use an online tool to do it: something like
Minify, which is a simple, free online tool that does what you want in seconds.
You would of course keep your original files as your working copies, but then minify them every time you make changes, and before uploading them to the server.
3. Choose .jpeg and .png Image Formats
The best image formats include JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Make sure you adjust the resolution and size for optimal display. Websites that sell products benefit from high-quality images because they attract impulse buyers. And these “impulse buys” generally make up well over half of purchases in many markets.
These buyers are fast-moving and often act irrationally. They rush to buy something for whatever reason and tend to overlook details. They won't take the time to read product specifications, and may buy based on how things look … or even how they’re feeling at that moment. If your web pages load quickly and you use high-quality images, you can target this fastest-converting group.
4. Compress Images
Use tools like
TinyPNG to compress images without losing noticeable quality. These are free resources so this is an option that will usually cost you nothing except your time.
You will often be surprised at how much page load time you can save, too. If the site has been created by a development team that isn’t too savvy about these things, image files can be enormous!
5. Minimize HTTP Requests
When your browser needs to retrieve content from a server (typically to build and display a web page) it makes what’s called an HTTP request to the server. If the page has 20 components (scripts, images, JavaScript files, style sheets, etc) your browser will send 20 HTTP requests. If it needs 50, it will send 50 requests. And so on.
As you can imagine, if you reduce the number of elements on a page you will decrease the number of requests sent to the server.
There are many ways to do this, but deleting unnecessary elements like images that aren’t used, JavaScript files that are loaded but not used, and combining multiple style sheets into one will often yield results quickly.
6. Implement Caching
This one is easy, but it can have a measurable effect on your page loading.
All you need to do is to use browser and server-side caching to store frequently accessed content, reducing the need to retrieve it from the server repeatedly.
The browser generally handles its own caching, though you can help this along by setting HTTP response headers. The two most used are Cache-control (which sets the length of time that elements are stored), and Expires (which simply sets an expiry date).
And for websites that rely on databases or involve CPU/memory intensive processes, it’s possible to set caches on the server utilizing a web proxy. We’ve mentioned it for completeness, but it’s a complex process which is only justified if you run a complex setup. If you want to look into it here’s a good guide on
using proxy servers.
7. Use Asynchronous and Deferred Loading for JavaScript
Asynchronous loading means that the JavaScript file is loaded in the background and does not block rendering. The script is then run as soon as it has been downloaded
Deferred loading actually delays running the script until after the document has been parsed.
Both options mean that the page can render in the meantime.
But they both also delay the execution of scripts, and if you need a script to run right away, you could compromise the operation of the page. So take care!
Wrap Up
This article highlights the ways you can use simple techniques to enhance web performance. By improving how your website processes content, you’ll significantly reduce load times, creating a smoother experience for users. And a more effective result for your business!
Faster websites have higher engagement, lower bounce rates. And because search engines favor sites that provide quick, efficient performance, you’ll have better SEO rankings too.
By addressing the factors we’ve mentioned, you can make sure your site runs more efficiently. And because this will boost user satisfaction, it will help your business maintain the competitive edge you need.
