The performance of a website is a lot more important today than it ever was in the past. After all, most users today are no longer as patient as they once were – dead links and slowdowns are more than enough to force visitors to look elsewhere. However, the problems won’t end there. They’re not just likely to tell their family and friends about the negative experience that they’ve had, but popular search engines like Google will take it into account and drop its ranking as a result. To this end, here are optimization tips for website performance.
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1. Begin with your images
Let’s face it – large images can slow down a website significantly. They force the browser to pull down more data. If you want to make sure that your web pages load swiftly, you’ll want to make strategic use of images and ensure that each one is optimized. From selecting the right format that will best fit the needs of the site to keeping the file size low without compromising on their overall quality, optimizing the images that you decide to use will allow for better performance, aAnd, in turn, help you engage and attract more users.
2. Leverage content delivery networks
Content delivery networks are increasingly becoming commonplace for many domain owners because of their unmatched efficacy in presenting static content that includes multimedia, downloads, and images, to name a few. They can deliver better performance for a website because their nature of being distributed essentially means that the content is served much closer to the users.
3. Select the infrastructure wisely
There’s a limit to what you can realistically achieve in optimizing a website, especially if the chosen infrastructure cannot meet your needs. It is for this reason that you must select one wisely. For example, instead of opting for shared hosting, you’ll have less risk of outages or slowdowns by choosing a hosting infrastructure that is dedicated solely to your web pages. This approach may cost you a little more now, but it will serve you better in the long run.
4. Minimize HTTP requests
Your chosen developer may prefer to maintain particular sets of files for CSS to ensure that everything remains organized throughout the development stages. By incorporating those very same files in much smaller sets before the website launches, you’ll drive down the number of requests for HTTP on the webserver, improving your website’s overall performance.
5. Don’t forget about analytics
From using a website traffic checker to the visitors that your site gets daily to seeing how your web pages rank globally, you must never forget about analytics. When you get right down to it, it is the only way you’ll know whether or not the adjustments and changes that you’ve made are making a difference to the site’s ability to attract and engage.
Website performance is much more important than it is given credit for, especially for businesses that rely on the internet. By making sure that your web pages load quickly, are as functional as they are pleasing to the eye, and have no technical issues, you’ll enhance your site’s level of engagement with users.