In today’s day and age, the world has become digitized, and businesses have to be focused on their website performance as much as on their office or retail outlet. Improving your website performance benefits your business in many ways. Millions of websites are browsed over the internet every single day. The competition is very high, and getting traffic to your website is tricky. If your website is not user-friendly, you can really just forget about it.
Poorly optimized website performance is caused by overwhelming issues, such as slow loading times, user incapabilities, hosting problems, SEO mistakes, and so on. When you have such issues on your site, you do not only lose conversions, but your overall brand image also gets hurt. You start having more problems like a high bounce rate and deteriorating search rankings. If you do not take corrective measures to improve website performance, you might end up losing potential leads just with a few seconds difference. This can particularly happen if your web pages load too slowly. Loading time is the time taken for your entire web page and its content to become visible in front of your site visitors when they key in or click its URL. A website that takes too long to show up will lose its visitors, thus reducing the chances of getting any leads and conversions.
If you work on improving your website performance, you can avoid all these problems and achieve new benchmarks on your path to customer acquisition. There are numerous tools available out there to check your website performance so that you can take action from the right stance. These tools provide grades according to your site’s speed, search engine rankings, traffic, and other parameters. These tools can also identify the issues that keep your website from progressing. If you know how to leverage these tools properly, you can soon optimize your website to get better results out of it.
The purpose of this post is to discuss tips on how to improve website performance.
12 Ways to Improve Website Performance
Here are some of the fundamental ways to improve website performance. By concentrating on this one by one, you can identify the biggest issue in your website performance and pay attention accordingly. If you can improve website performance, you’ll have a greater chance of obtaining quality leads, conversions, and ultimately sales.
1. Upgrade Your Web Hosting Plan
Most website owners like to choose a typical web hosting plan. These plans are easy to implement, low-priced, and starter-friendly. If you do not update your website that often, a starter hosting plan can be an excellent fit for it. But if you usually publish progressive content on your site, you will soon start facing problems with your hosting. In this case, the best option is to upgrade the web hosting plan. Upgrading the plan will make your users happy and help you maintain strong search engine optimization. Using a scalable hosting plan allows you to improve website performance and let your traffic grow with ease.
2. Enable Leverage Browser Caching
Browser caching is essential for improving your website performance. It cuts down the load on the webserver and helps reduce the loading time of your web pages. When a user visits your website, their program will download all the content on that page as regular static documents like JS and CSS files. If they go to another page on your site, their browser will start downloading the content again. But has enabled the option to leverage browser caching. The user’s browser will only download the unique content to a specific web page. The static files, in this case, will serve directly from your program. This will allow you to accelerate your website speed and improve website performance.
3. Enable GZIP Compression
If you enable the GNU Zip or GZIP on your website, it will perform better speed and loading time. GZIP lets you compress your web pages on the server end and send the loaded content to the user’s browser. The files are then uncompressed and served from the browser when the user queries.
This process allows you to reduce the size of your web page, which in turn diminishes the time it takes to download the asset. It lets you minimize user information utilization and enhances your opportunity to render your pages initially. Overall, it is a way to improve website performance.
4. Clean Up Excess Plugins
Excessive plugins on your dashboard or website’s backend can make the system heavy and reduce your site’s performance and speed. It makes all activities harder to carry out. Your website’s stacking speed also gets worse, which causes security gaps to develop. Attackers might start abusing the gaps to get access to your site’s backend. So if you have any plugins installed that you are no longer using, it is best to deactivate them and uninstall them to improve website performance.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
5. Reduce HTTP Requests
If you have many HTTP requests on your site, your users will incur an extended loading time for all your web pages. Larger files take significantly longer to load and exchange. The easiest way to reduce the number of HTTP requests on your site is to not utilize much of the content, pictures, Flash, CSS, and so forth. This will definitely improve website performance.
6. Minify Javascript and CSS Files
Minifying Javascript and CSS files means limiting the code and increasing your site’s number of web pages and content files. This is one of the primary strategies many website owners use to decrease load times and use the site’s transmission capacity.
7. Optimize All Images
Images play a critical role in connecting your items with your clients. If your website takes more than three seconds to load, for instance, clients are likely to desert it. This will cause your bounce rate to rise and negatively influence your conversion rate in the long run. Focusing on image optimization can enhance your page load speed, search engine optimization, conversion rate, and user engagement. In other words, it will help you improve website performance.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
8. Use a Content Delivery Network
The purpose of using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is to improve your user’s experience of browsing through your website. CDNs also help you anticipate any potential site crashes if you get huge traffic influxes to your site on a particular day. Using a CDN can thus improve website performance.
9. Fix Broken Links
We all know that Google rankings are determined by hyperlinks. Connecting your site’s pages with each other is absolutely vital. Fix any broken links immediately. If everything is okay with all your site’s links, each click by a user will lead them to the perfect spot. But if your links are broken, the user will just become confused and annoyed and will probably leave your site. Fixing broken links is a way to improve website performance.
10. Use a Reliable CMS
Your website is generally the focal point of your digital marketing strategy. The CMS serves as the core of your site. Therefore, if you want to improve website performance, you must use a reliable CMS. A CMS rids you of a middle man and empowers you to update and refresh your website content. It gives you the capacity to make your website more unique and profitable for your users. WordPress is known to be the most reliable CMS unless you use a website builder like Strikingly, which takes care of all the coding itself so that you don’t have to worry about the CMS at all.
Image taken from Strikingly
11. Optimize Your Database
Another way to improve website performance is to optimize your MySQL database. This needs to be done regularly, especially if you’re using WordPress or another CMS that relies heavily on database utilization.
12. Build Your Website on Strikingly
If you want to make the entire process of improving your website performance simpler, build your site on Strikingly and get the burden off your shoulders.
Image taken from Strikingly
Strikingly is a website development platform that pretty much takes care of everything at your site’s backend in terms of its speed, loading time, coding, programming, and even web designing. All you need to do to build a website on Strikingly is register for your free account with us. We will provide you with free, ready-to-use templates to use as your website design. You can add content and upload images on your web pages through our user-friendly Strikingly editor.
We keep coming up with new tools and features on our platform, as our goal is to ease out the process for you to build and run a professional website with us. If you have any questions on how to improve website performance or resolve a specific issue about your Strikingly website, you can get in touch with us any time via the live chat on our landing page. We are always anxious to hear from you and sort out any technical matters regarding our platform.
