Ours is a world where we turn to the Web for many, many practices. Research, browsing, entertainment, purchasing and information are but a few of the many reasons visitors may take to the site of any given business. The Internet connects us, and that’s powerful, but it also empowers consumers to be picky. If the first site they land on doesn’t deliver they are just a search away from an alternative. As such, having a site that performs well and is user-friendly enough to keep visitors in engaged is every bit as important as bringing visitors to your site in the first place.
Consider this, Website Magazine reports that research from the Aberdeen Group found that a delay of even a second in page load time will yield 11 percent fewer page views, and result in a 7 percent decline in customer conversions and a 16 percent dive in customer satisfaction––not to mention the fact that Google takes site performance into account when it comes to page rankings as well.
So, feeling like you want to take a long look at your site performance and could use a few simple tips for improvement? Yeah, us too.
As in most exercises, it’s important to start at the beginning when it comes to site performance improvements. Before you start making changes visit a performance-testing site––webpagetest.org is free, quick and detailed––to get a sense of how well your site is currently performing and what areas are of concern. Such tools are a great to help pinpoint issues, but speaking in broad terms there are three areas that are key in determining site performance: server hardware, front-end performance (think HTML, images, CSS and JavaScript) and server scripting optimization.
Hardware: Check In On Your Server
At the risk of over-simplifying, your server is the end all and be all of site performance. No matter how well your page should perform based on design and scripting optimization, it cannot perform successfully if your server isn’t up to snuff. As with overall site performance testing sites, there are web tools that can evaluate and monitor servers. If such tools or your own investigation indicate that your server is not capable of handling the traffic to your site it is essential to upgrade or even migrate your server.
Server-Side: Use Compression
Compression methods such as gzip and Deflate are for the shrinking of file sizes to make sure your pages open as quickly as possible. Many Web hosts have built-in compression, but for those that don’t, options to set up compression applications exists.
Front-End: Minimize These Elements
Just as an inbound marketing agency will optimize your site using SEO to stimulate page rankings and traffic, you should ensure that the design of your site is optimized for speed, performance and usability. In other words, avoid the use of elements that can slow down your site, cause technical difficulties or crashes. Plugins and redirects are among the worst offenders that can take site speed down to a crawl.
We hope these tips help your company enhance your website page performance. Don’t forget, we can help with the marketing––The Great Online is an inbound marketing agency that is dedicated to giving clients the very best in online marketing.
