Website Performance

Ever stop to think that maybe your site isn’t getting results like you hoped – because it’s not loading fast enough? If you haven’t, it’s time to start. To put it bluntly, performance can make or break a website.

Speed is a crucial aspect in providing a pleasant user experience to visitors of your site. It ensures that a visitor’s limited attention span and time are spent on actual content and not wasted waiting for images and scripts to load.

Although the number of users accessing the internet on slow dial-up connections is shrinking (3-5% in US), the percentage of folks using mobile phones to access the web is increasing dramatically; and for some sectors, such as social media and search, mobile has already exceeded desktop usage. If you have a smartphone, then you know how frustrating it is to wait for a web page to fully display over a cellular data connection, therefore website performance is very important to take a look at.

Website performance is critical regardless of how your users access your website. A study by Google showed that in the addition of just 100 to 400 milliseconds to their search results page resulted in reduced searches. Other studies show that users expect a site to load in under 2 seconds, and nearly a third of your audience will leave your site for another if it doesn’t. Furthermore, those people aren’t likely to come back. Google has added site speed to its search algorithm, so if your website is taking too long to load, it’s not likely to show up in that first screen of results.

There are many things you can do to improve the performance of your website, and they fall under two broad categories: limiting file sizes and reducing the number of requests to the server.

Speed Matters

The following list only scratches the surface for website optimization, but it gives you a general idea of what can be done.

Choose simple illustrations over details photographs when you can
Optimize images so they are the smallest file size possible without sacrificing quality.
Minimize HTML and CSS documents by removing extra character spaces and line returns.
Keep JavaScript to a minimum.

Add scripts in such a way that they load in parallel with other page assets and don’t block rendering.
Don’t load unnecessary assets (such as images, scripts, or JavaScript libraries).
Reduce the number of times the browser makes requests of the server.

Image Optimization

Images are the vast majority of your site’s file size, and optimizing images to reduce their size can make your site load several times faster.

The following list contains key points for optimizing images on your site:

Streamline HTML markup, avoiding unnecessary levels of nested elements.
Use PNGs if you need transparency.
Use a GIF if you need motion.
Use SVG for simple icons, logos, and illustrations

Use PNGs PNG-8 or GIF with a reduced color count for images with few colors.
Use JPEG at a lower image quality (30-60) for colorful photos.
Resize images to match their display size.
Display smaller background images on smaller devices.

Every trip to the server in the form of an HTTP request takes a few milliseconds, and those milliseconds can add up. All those little Twitter widgets, Facebook Like buttons, and advertisements can make dozens of server requests each. You may be surprised to see how many server requests even a simple website makes.

Recommended Website Performance Tools

GTmetrix – https://gtmetrix.com – A free tool that analyzes your page’s speed performance.

Pingdom – https://tools.pingdom.com – The test is designed to help make your site faster by identifying what about a webpage is fast, slow, too big, and so on.

Let Us Optimize Your Website Speed

Is your website sluggish or even just running a little slow? Are you keeping file sizes as small as possible? Is your website making unnecessary server requests? We are specialized in getting the maximum performance out of any type of website, including yours. Our goal when optimizing any website is to get the maximum out of it performance wise. After analyzing the website we will optimize all the possible performance issues so the website performs at a much higher speed. Contact Us today to get a free quote.