Improving Your Website’s Performance

Your website performance is critical for connecting with customers online. If your site takes too long to load, users are not going to wait around. In this lesson, you’ll learn why website performance is important, how to improve load speed, how to optimize the elements of your web page, and how to reduce the workload of your server to build a website that performs at its best.

The Importance of Website Performance

People love things that are fast. The delivery speed of your takeout order. How quickly your airplane gets from point A to point B. And guess what? People love fast websites, too. What is website performance? It’s the speed at which web pages are downloaded and displayed in a user’s web browser. Basically, website performance tells you how fast your website is.

How to Increase Website Speed

Why is website speed so important?

• Rankings in organic search

• Visibility on Facebook

• The user experience

Website performance impacts rankings in organic search.

There are many factors that search engines use to rank organic results on a search engine results pages, also known as “SERPs”. Factors include the URL, title and header tags, inbound links, site architecture, and, you guessed it, website speed. And if you think about it, that makes a lot of sense.

Performance is important to search engines.

Search engines like Google want to offer the best experience to its users. If a website takes too long to load it will probably see a higher bounce rate in website. And this is even more true on mobile. If Google can surface comparable webpages that have a faster load time, they will – because they’re solving for their users and helping them find answers to their questions or solve their

problems faster.

Website performance impacts visibility on Facebook.

Facebook has always taken the load speed of the content that appears in the Facebook News Feed into consideration. For example, if you’re on a slow connection, you’ll see more text and image content than videos. Facebook also takes your website’s performance into consideration in their algorithm, particularly for mobile app users. If your post links to a slow website, it may not be displayed to people using the Facebook app. This means that you’re missing out on views, interactions, and traffic from Facebook. Optimizing your website’s performance could result in an increase in referral traffic from Facebook.

Website performance impacts the user experience.

And a poor user experience affects the website metrics that you care about, like bounce rate and conversion rate.

How Quickly Should a Page Load?

40% of people will leave a page that takes longer than

three seconds to load.

Will people come back to a slow site?

The short answer—no! 80% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same website again. It can be easy to think of website performance as an afterthought of the development process or as the final step in a project. The problem with this approach is that it solves for the creative process but not for the end-user.

Website performance isn’t just a technical concern.

Website Performance Affects:

• The accessibility of your site

• The usability of your site

• Your web design

What is accessibility?

Accessibility is the availability of a website and its contents to all people.

How does performance impact accessibility?

Well, think about all the different ways people might be accessing your site. Some people might use text-tospeech or magnification functionality. Others might be accessing your site from a slower internet speed. And many will be on a mobile device using cellular networks. If your website has poor performance, it becomes less accessible to everyone in a variety of circumstances. Learn more about website accessibility here.

What is usability?

Usability is how efficiently and easily visitors can see or examine your website.

How does usability impact performance?

If your website or its elements take too long to load, it is inherently less usable. Things like the navigation, menus, content, images, videos, hyperlinks, forms – all those

things impact a website’s usability. When you include these on your website, you need these features to be optimized to perform their best to offer great usability.

What is website design?

Website Design is the process of planning, ideating, and organizing content for the internet. How does website design impact performance? Website design isn’t just how a website looks – it’s how it works, too. A poorly designed website can lead to performance issues later down the road. For example, the overall layout of your website pages impacts a site’s hierarchy. And the fonts that you use impacts how your website performs. Your page may look pretty, but if it doesn’t perform well it is not a good design. Think about the website performance metrics that matter to you. Performance impacts metrics marketers care about, like traffic, conversion rates, and revenue. Let’s take a look at the impact of website performance for Carousell.com. Carousell.com is a marketplace for buying and selling new and secondhand goods.

how to increase website speed wordpress

What did improving website performance help Carousell.com

achieve?

Carousell.com reduced their load time by 65% and saw a 63% increase in traffic. That’s a drastic increase in traffic that is happened because they took the time to improve their website’s performance.

Website performance isn’t just a technical concern.

The first criteria to have a look at whilst optimizing your internet site is the general page load velocity. Load speed is the time it takes to absolutely display the content on a selected page.

How fast should a page load?

Best-in-class webpages should load within 3 seconds. That’s how long people are willing to wait before they start clicking the back button and finding a different site that loads faster. Does your website take longer to load? If you are not positive, head on over

to Website Grader to discover. When diagnosing your internet site load velocity, there are some other metrics to examine, such as “first contentful paint” and “time to interactive”. First Contentful Paint (FCP) is the time it takes in seconds for text or images to be shown to users. Time to Interactive (TTI) is when the page responds to user interactions, such as clicking, within 50ms. FCP and TTI metrics are growing in popularity. Being able to see content on a website and interact with it is closer to how users feel about site speed than the actual page load speed of a website. But improving load speed can help you improve FCP and TTI metrics as well.

There are many ways to improve your web page load velocity, together with minification and compression.

To understand minification and compression, we’re going to talk about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This will not only help you understand how to reduce your page load speed and improve user experience on your website, but it’ll also help you sound knowledgeable in front of your web development team.

What is minification?

A natural place to start when looking to increase your webpage’s load speed is to reduce the size of what’s actually being loaded. This is where minification comes

In. Minification is the method of reducing aid size by way of disposing of pointless remarks and spacing within the source code. These characters encompass whitespaces, line breaks, and comments which can be beneficial for us people however needless for machines. Don’t worry, minification is not a permanent change the code. In wellknown, minification creates a new minified model of your supply code. This manner you can always keep enhancing your supply code. You can constantly unminify to paintings on it and reminify your code to make it smaller once more.We minify the files of a website containing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to reduce the file size so your web browser can read them faster.

What are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?

To recognize minification, you first need to know a handful of factors about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They are additives of each website that outline the

structure, style, and behavior of a webpage. Each of these components work together to create a webpage.

The Components of a Website:

• HTML provides the basic structure of sites, which is enhanced and modified by CSS and JavaScript.

• CSS is used to edit the presentation, formatting, and layout of page.

• JavaScript is used to govern the conduct of different factors.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can all be minified. Don’t worry, unless you are a technical marketer and have built your website yourself, minification is usually a job for your web developer.

How minification works:

This might lead you to question what exactly is happening, when you minify files. To start, developers create these files with convenience in mind. They make the code easier for people to read by including whitespace, comments, and long variable names. But this also creates larger files to transfer across the internet and more for the web browser to read. That’s where minification comes in. It essentially removes these extra elements, making it harder for humans to read, but easier (and faster) for web browsers to read. Here is what is happening when you minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

• HTML minification removes all unnecessary characters from the HTML.

• CSS minification removes all the unnecessary characters and comments from your stylesheet, the file that contains font and layout rules.

• JavaScript minification removes all unnecessary characters and comments from the JavaScript

Wondering what tools you can use for minification?

Tools for Minification:

• To minify HTML, try out the PageSpeed Insights Chrome extension.

• For CSS, try CSS Compressor.

• For JavaScript, you could use JS Compress.