If you want to stay competitive in the online world, having a slow website is one way to lose big time. Your website should be performing at a high level, offering your visitors a fast and streamlined experience.
A page that is slow-loading is absolutely unacceptable, and many of today’s users will not have the patience to wait. Think about your website as a first impression. If it is slow, then that is a reflection of your business and many will look for something better.
A high performing website is the key to getting ahead, and achieving your desired results. A high performing website will translate into higher rankings, conversion rates, and better engagement with your target audience.
So how do you optimize your website for optimal performance? Today we’re giving you ten ways to boost your website performance for your visitors and search engines in 2021.
10 Ways to Boost Your Website Performance in 2021
Try a CDN or Upgrade to a Multi-CDN
Using a content delivery network (CDN) is a great way to make your website faster. If you don’t know, CDNs are remote servers that work together to provide fast delivery of internet content. Using a single CDN is a great start to boost your website’s performance, but you can also upgrade to multi-CDNs.
These CDNs from different providers will help you achieve better, more stable website performance if you find that using a single-CDN just isn’t cutting it. A multi-CDN set up can enhance your website’s global performance, and it ensures uninterrupted website uptime.
Minimize HTTP requests
Hyper transfer protocol (HTTP) requests made whenever a browser fetches a file, page or picture from a web server. These requests make up a majority of your webpage’s loading time. You can reduce the number of these requests by:
- Combining javascript and css files
- Loading only what’s needed
- Using fewer images
Use Smaller Images
Another simple thing you can do to improve your website’s performance is to reduce the image sizes on your website. You can reduce their actual size, combine them into CSS sprites, or set a container property to max width not surpassing 90% of boundary width.
Compress Files
In a similar manner, the smaller your files are the faster your pages will load. By using a compression software like Gzip, you can automatically compress your files before they are uploaded to your website.
Enable Website Caching
Caching is the process of storing data in a cache and a cache is a temporary storage area. When you browse a web page you have recently viewed on your browser you will be able to get them from the cache instead of the original server. This saves time and saves the network the addition of more traffic.
Load Javascript Separately
You can prevent certain files from loading until after other elements of your web page are loaded. If you defer larger files like JavaScript from loading you can make sure that the rest of your content loads up without any delay.
Inspect Your Hosting Service Plan
If you’ve followed most of the above steps and you still find that your web performance is slow, you should check in with your service provider to see whether you have shared or dedicated hosting. When you have a shared hosting account, you share server space with dozens of other websites and this causes your website speed to be negatively impacted. If so, then it’s a great time to think about switching to a dedicated plan where you will have sole access to your own server.
Reduce Server Response Times
The amount of time your DNS lookup takes is one of the biggest factors in how quickly your website will load. A DNS looki[ is the process of finding a certain DNS record. You can check the DNS speed report of your provider and see which providers offer the highest speeds.
Prioritize Above-the-Fold Content
Above-the-fold content is the portion of a webpage that is visible in the browser when the page first loads. You can improve user experience by having your above-the-fold content load faster than the rest of the page. This is also known as “lazy loading”, and this way your site visitor won’t have to wait to access your page while the rest of it loads. The images and other content will load as they start to scroll down.
Reduce the Number of Plugins
Plugins are a common part of every site, but they can bog down your website’s performance if you have too many of them. While they are useful for adding specific features to your website, they take up necessary resources in order to run. We recommend that you go through your plugins and delete any that are no longer necessary. You should also try and avoid adding on any plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles, and those that generate a large number of database queries. Only keep what is necessary and make sure they are up to date.
While some of these tips might sound minor, they do add up in the end. When used together they can help boost your website’s performance by a wide margin. If they can shave seconds off of your website load time, this can make a world of difference when it comes to visitor experience and conversion rates for your business.
Keep in mind that a typical user will expect your web page to load in 3 seconds or less! If you cannot provide this then you could be losing a lot of website traffic and revenue in the end.
