Beyond making a website that looks nice and offers information to your online audience, there are other factors that contribute to a truly functional website with optimal performance. The reason is that a website that performs poorly will not only drive away your potential customers but also impact your visibility on search engines. Poor performance can snowball into graver issues down the line, with everything – your conversion rates, potential for income, and customer service – all at stake.
Here are different ways to improve your website performance, and these are all easily achievable by collaborating with a local website development company.
Step 1: Perform a Complete Site Audit
Before you go in and make a couple of changes to your website, the first step is to identify which areas need help and attention. A comprehensive site audit can be used to determine these. This process evaluates your website performance based on numerous metrics. Popular tools for audits include Page Speed Insights, Semrush On Page SEO Checker, and Ahrefs Site Audit. These will gauge your website through metrics such as page load time, readability, backlinks, organic traffic, and bounce rate so that you will be made aware of which areas need improvement.
Step 2: Find Solutions
The next step would be to get to work to optimize the areas that need improvement. The solution depends on which specific criteria you’d like to improve on. If your web pages are loading, then you may take a look at the server and consider implementing a DNS. If your bounce rate is quite high, you can perhaps use bigger font sizes on important sections, improve the readability of each page by leveraging negative space, or improve your site’s navigability. If you find that your website experiences delays when opened using mobile browsers, then you’ll need to work on its mobile compatibility. Working with a web developer or local website development company can help you access tried-and-tested solutions for these issues.
Step 3: Keep An Eye Out For 404 Errors
This type of error typically comes up if your content has been either moved to another URL or removed entirely. This typically happens if changes were made but the URLs were not adjusted accordingly which means that your audience will encounter a dead end as they navigate through your site. You can fix this by double-checking the URLs, reviewing the files located in your directory, or deleting browser cache and cookies that may interfere with how your webpage loads.
Step 4: Do Not Use Unnecessary Or Excessive WordPress Plugins
There is such a thing as too many WordPress plugins. These handy tools may be incredibly useful, but they actually pull resources from your database whenever your online visitor loads a new page. Having too many of them installed can so remember to regularly audit and assess which ones are worth keeping. The rule of thumb is to not go beyond 20 different plugins per site.
Step 5: Implement a CDN
A content delivery network, also known as a content distribution network, lets you utilise proxy servers that are geographically distributed so that your website loading time speeds up as your user is technically closer to your web content. This is significantly better compared to hosting your entire website on a single server, which means that all requests from every single visitor are processed by the same hardware, inevitably slowing your website down.
Step 6: Consider Moving Your Site To A Better Host
There are three main types of hosting: shared, VPS or virtual private server, and dedicated. Shared hosting is a fan favourite because of its affordability. Since you are sharing with other sites, the costs for the resources are split among you and other users. If you want to access a bigger server with more freedom for configuration, try VPS. It’s the perfect choice for sites with moderate or fluctuating traffic, like e-commerce stores. Dedicated hosting is the most expensive option and this can also be your own physical server.
Step 7: Optimize The Images On Your Site
Image optimisation directly impacts your loading speed, which can help you rank higher on SERPs. While great images help your brand stand out and improve user experience, they should never come at the cost of making your site slow down. As such, making sure to include high-quality images that follow the right format, size, resolution, and dimensions will help your website load faster.
Step 8: Improve Your FCP
The first contentful paint or FCP is the duration it takes to load the very first object on your site to your visitor’s browser. Keep in mind that this is a different metric compared to the load time because this doesn’t measure the speed of the entire page. It only focuses on the first item that will appear. This is measured in seconds and the best time is anything less than 1.8 seconds. You’ll need some improvements if your FCP is 1.9 to 3 seconds long. You can do this by minimizing or deleting render-blocking resources such as unused scripts or styles. You can also defer scripts asynchronously so that you can prioritise the essential elements and allow them to load for your user before everything else. In that way, you eliminate any frustrations your online visitor may experience from waiting for elements to load, and this also benefits your bounce rate.
Conclusion
Your website performance encompasses numerous criteria, and your business will benefit from optimizing these areas. Working with a local website development company can help you accomplish a site that performs excellently.
