What is Website Speed Optimization and Web Performance?
What is Website Speed Optimization and Web Performance?
In this article, you will know what is website speed optimization and web performance best practices for improvement.
The speed at which web pages get downloaded and displayed on any user’s web browser is called web performance or website speed.
Any changes made to the website for increasing website speed or improve web performance is called web optimization or website optimization.
Why is Web Performance Important?
Website download speeds that are faster have been demonstrated to boost visitor retention, loyalty, and happiness.
This is particularly true among those users who have slow internet connections and/or use mobile devices for browsing.
Web performance also results in fewer data travelling across the web which in turn lowers a website's power usage and its impact on the environment.
How does Poor Web Performance Affect Businesses?
There is a positive correlation between the speed of the website performance and the conversion rates.
Your visitors will be more satisfied if your website loads quickly.
In other words, by reducing the time it takes for a web page to load, you may increase the user experience (UX), conversion rates, and, eventually, your sales and income.
How do I test Web Performance?
There are several sites on the internet available for anyone to test the speed of their website(s).
Some of the reliable and popular Website Performance Testing sites are mentioned below:
It is always advised to test the web performance for both desktop and mobile devices as the latter load slower than the former but is more widely used.
Having certain differences in the test results from different testing websites is also a common occurrence.
However, going through these analyses will give you a general overview of the performance of your site.
What are the reasons for Poor Web Performance?
There are plenty of factors that determine how a website performs.
Browser/server cache, image optimization, and encryption (for example, SSL) are some factors that influence the time it takes for pages to render.
Steve Souders who coined the term ‘Web Performance Optimization’ proposed in the year 2007 that 80% of web speed is controlled by front-end structures.
How to Improve Web Performance?
Techniques like multi-layered cache, low weight presentation layer component design and asynchronous communication with server-side components can all help enhance web page performance.
Let us now know the aforesaid in detail:
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Front End Optimization
There are various strategies for reducing web page load times by streamlining web optimization processes.
Front end optimization (FEO) or content optimization is the term for this technique.
FEO focuses on lowering file sizes and reducing the number of requests required to load a particular page.
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Reduce Number of Plugins
Plugins are important for accessing features on-site, however, these plugins also make the site slower and might affect site security negatively.
It is also commonly seen that with the installation of new plugins, some of the old ones are not in use and become obsolete.
If such is the case, these plugins must be removed and only the necessary ones should be kept.
One can also perform tests in order to know what plugin is causing the website to slow down and should remove it if it is not that important.
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Switching to Better Hosting Service
Nowadays there are plenty of hosting services like Shared Web Hosting, Colocation Web Hosting, Cloud Hosting etcetera available to users around the world.
Among these, shared hosting is the most common type of hosting utilized all over the world as it is the cheapest of all.
However, to ensure optimal optimization, it's critical to select a fast web host but shared hosting that is slower than VPS or dedicated hosting.
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Group CSS Files
If your website has a lot of JavaScript and CSS files, it will result in a lot of HTTP requests from visitors who wish to access specific files.
These requests are handled separately by each visitor's browser, slowing down the website's operation.
Your website will surely speed faster if you reduce the quantity of JavaScript and CSS files.
In order to do that you can try to combine all JavaScript files into one, as well as all CSS files.
The total number of HTTP requests will be reduced as a result of this. There are also numerous tools available to quickly minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
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Caching
The technique of saving the latest version of your website on your hosting server and displaying it until it is updated is what is known as caching.
This means that the web page does not have to be re-rendered for each user as a cached web page does not need to make database requests every time it is accessed.
It's vital to remember that the methods for website caching vary depending on the platform on which your website is built.
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Lazy Loading
With the use of lazy loading for pictures and video, the time is taken for them to load reduces.
It also minimizes the amount of data contained and system resources consumed, all of which improve website speed.
It is used to postpone an object's initialization until it is required and loads it only when it is needed.
As an example, images are loaded only when the user scrolls down the page, rather than loading all photos at once.
The default behaviour does not include lazy loading and takes longer which causes slow down.
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Code Minification
The technique of deleting all extraneous characters from the source code without affecting its functioning is known as minification.
White space characters, newline characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters are, for example, used to make the code more readable but are not required for it to run.
Minification decreases the amount of source code, making it easier to send across a network and hence improves web performance.
Conclusion
You now know what is website speed optimization and web performance.
We hope you will now make your site run faster which in turn will make the site visitors and users happy and increase your revenue.
In case you require some technical assistance, feel free to contact us. We are always more than happy to help!
