How to Increase your Website Performance

What we’ll tech you:

• What is website performance?

• What affects performance?

• 5 key things you can do to improve your website performance

• How to see what’s causing a dip in performance

What is website performance?

It’s simple really, website performance is how fast a website loads and displays its content. Although similar, site performance is not technically classed as SEO, but both are important and related in many ways - if your site performance is poor, no matter what you do SEO wise, your site won’t rank.

What can affect your website’s performance?

Poor optimisation is a main culprit for poor performance. All elements from code to functionality features should be optimised to ensure they place minimal strain on the website which will make it quicker to load. Anything that can impact the speed of the site should be optimised such as file size, browser caching, content delivery networks and mobile conversion. Here are some practical things that you can do to improve your website performance.

1. Minimise file size

The bigger the images and videos are on your site, the more time the site will take to load them. A tip for minimising file size is to upload images as WebP’s and videos as WebM’s via a content hosting platform. You’ll be able to take your file sizes from MB’s to KB’s without loosing quality.

2. Optimise mobile conversion

Your website should be as fast as possible on all devices. Considering most people will search on their phones on the go, it’s important for the mobile conversion to be efficient too.

3. Clean up messy code

If your site has poorly optimised code, which doesn’t add value or functionality, it’s gotta go! Make sure that any code your using is earning it’s place and isn’t throttling your site.

4. Optimise viewport tracking components

Create components that only initiate when they are in the the users viewport. This will mean that the website isn’t loading content that isn’t being seen at the time which will make the site’s loading more efficient.

5. Use browser caching

Browser caching is a useful because it temporarily stores content file like images and scripts to minimise network traffic. This saves bandwidth and increases the speed of loading times! 

How to find out what’s causing a dip in your site’s performance?

The best was to identify what’s causing your website to have poor performance is to use tools like Semrush and Chrome’s performance tool which should highlight the areas that are slowing down your site by completing a site audit. It will then analyse the results to tell you the details of how each function is performing. Besides this it’s alway important to ensure that the best performances practices are being met to narrow down what the problem is.