Web pages are basic elements of any company’s communication strategy. They can serve as a landing page for new consumers, a contact tool, and sales or service promotion. Thus, improving the performance of your website should be seen as a strategic investment, which increases a visitor’s browsing time and his chances of becoming a consumer
But what is the best strategy? Learn here 6 ways to improve the performance of your business website!
1. Use a few images and opt for compression
In general, images are the heaviest files on any website and they are a big problem for pages to load. Basically, the more images there are, the less optimized your site becomes. Therefore, our first tip to improve the website performance is that you avoid using too many images, leaving only the necessary ones.
However, in some cases, the use of many images and other even heavier multimedia content, such as videos, is necessary. For example, some sites need a layout that focuses on displaying photographs, usually large in size to reach a greater number of devices.
For these sites, a great option is a compression, which can reduce the size of files and consequently their impact on page load time. Using codecs and specialized tools, it is possible to compress content without any visible loss of quality. In some cases, the compression ratio can reach 10:1!
Another option is to use CSS Sprites. This CSS technique allows you to group several images into a single one to be manipulated later through the code. So, whenever a user enters your site, only one image is loaded by the server and not several. This reduces the number of resources consumed and consequently helps you improve the performance of your website.
2. Avoid using multiple plugins
Using plugins can be great for any website. That’s because they bring a series of extra features that help you make it more beautiful, safe and attractive. However, you have to be careful, as many plugins can be a problem if you want to improve the performance of your site.
Each plugin used on a website can not only slow downloading, but also increase processing, memory, and, on laptops, battery usage.
The alternative lies in the use of HTML5. The latest version of the text markup language behind all websites has brought new tags that help natively embed videos, images, and other multimedia content. So pages can stay within business design guidelines without compromising their performance.
3. Optimize Java Script
Despite being versatile and fundamental for modern web pages, scripts programmed in Java Script influence the overall performance of the page. Although this is a factor more linked to the user’s device (since web engines, such as WebKit and Trident, deal with such scripts in different ways), the company must protect itself, optimizing its algorithms to the maximum.
And the idea here is to review all the code, seeking to eliminate unnecessary lines, white spaces, and other problems. It is also possible to use specific programs for compression, which optimize all the code and improve its performance.
With the help of tests on several machines, the web developer can also identify points that need improvement, reducing the execution time of each page function.
If another professional or an agency created your site and you don’t know how to do it, ask them to review and/or test it. In the end, you will be able to improve the performance of your site through very simple measures.
4. Have a responsive website to improve website performance
Responsive websites are those that adapt the page content according to the user’s screen size. Always focused on giving relevance to the main content, this type of design has gained prominence in recent years for encouraging the use of good performance practices (such as the intensive use of HTML5).
With a few lines changed in the CSS, the web developer is able to create mechanisms to optimize the structure of the address and, at the same time, guarantee improvements in ranking in search pages.
Thus, you can improve the performance of your website while guaranteeing a good ranking in search engines. Which, on both counts, only benefits you and your business as a whole.
5. Use a CDN to improve website performance
CDN is an acronym for Content Delivery Network, which in Portuguese means: Content Delivery Network. It is a network of servers that store replicas of content from other websites in memory and delivers them to visitors based on geographic location.
In other words, a CDN is able to deliver your website content to visitors always through the closest server. Thus, the page load time decreases and you can improve the website performance as a whole.
Newer CDNs also have other features, such as Dynamic Content Cache, which further offloads server processing to further speed up loading; and the Web Application Firewall (WAF), which brings more security and protection against online threats.
In fact, the security factor is another advantage brought by CDNs, especially against DDoS attacks. Thus, you can improve the performance of your site and provide it with more security.
6. Less is more!
Finally, our last tip for you to improve the performance of your site is to abandon everything that is unnecessary. Eliminate all plugins, scripts, files, and extensions that are not really relevant.
All this consumes memory and processing power, decreasing performance. So try to keep only what is really necessary and relevant to your site!
Thanks for reading this article by ExtNext, hope you will learn something about Website Performance
