3 Simple Ways to Improve Website Uptime and Performance

Does your organization have a website? In this age of digital marketing and information technology, your organization cannot perform well without a website. Remember, this isn't the last thing to do.   Already have a website? Today, having a website that is continuously available and responds with good speed is one of the most important things for success.

Further, you need to bring in as much traffic as possible to your website. And that's not an easy task. In addition to a lot of things, such as great and relevant content, proper optimization for the search engines, your website also needs to have a very good uptime and also be fast. People expect a fast and responsive website and will not settle for anything less.

Want to Know Why Website Uptime and Performance are Important?

Because the website visitors expect your site to completely load within 2 seconds.  That includes the large images with highest resolution that you added to your site. And if your site doesn't load quickly, they may leave the site. This creates another problem; as such behaviour increases your website’s bounce rate, which has a negative impact on your website’s ranking on search engines.

If you are responsible for managing your website, you must try to enhance the uptime and performance of your site.  Wondering how you can enhance your website’s uptime?  Firstly, we need to acknowledge that this subject is vast. Secondly, for websites that have millions of visitors the methods and techniques to improve uptime and performance are quite complicated. But, for a typical small organization there are a few simple things that can make a huge difference in the website uptime and site performance.  Here’s a quick look at some of the things that might help you to have a superior website.

Choose a Good Website Hosting Provider or Plan

Where are you hosting your website? What are the plans available with your hosting provider and what plan have you chosen? This is the first thing that you need to examine and audit.  Sometimes, the choice on the plan was made years ago and today the same provider may be providing better options at lesser prices too.

The platform that you choose for hosting your website is surely going to play an extremely important role in deciding the uptime performance of your website. Remember, it’s not only the amount of bandwidth they’re offering you, but the kind of service they’re providing you during a downtime that really matters.

So, if you’re looking to improve the website uptime, you should first take a look at your current hosting service. And if required, don’t shy away from upgrading the hosting service or changing the hosting provider.

Optimize the Images on Your Website

Is your website taking too long to load? Are your site visitors complaining about the website speed?

You must first take a look at the file size of images on your website. Is the number of images present on your website really high?  Actually more than the number of images, it could be the file size of the images that can have a negative impact on the website load time and speed. So, try to reduce the size of the images on your website as much as possible.  You can reduce the size of the images without compromising the quality and optimize them to improve the performance of the website.

At times, it may be possible to delete some images. Some images may not be improving the site usability and appeal. It is possible that over focus on images and appeal may have led to additional images that do not create the desired positive impact on the visitors.  However, they negatively affect the site speed thereby further adding to the bad user experience for the site visitors.

Use HTTP, CSS, and JavaScript Prudently

How are you using HTTP in your website? The more HTTP requests your site makes to the server, the more time it is likely to take to load the site. Hence, it is always a good idea to keep the number of the HTTP requests as low as possible. Besides, you can also focus on using only a single file for all CSS items of the website. There may also be multiple JavaScript files.  Further, all these files may be loading when someone visits the page even though they may not be used. Ensure that you make use of the JavaScript files only when it is necessary. Why not keep them in a single file too? These simple precautions are surely going to improve your website’s uptime at least to a certain extent.

Focus on Simple Not Advanced Ways for Improving Website Uptime and Performance

Website’s uptime plays an extremely important role in improving its overall performance. Hence, you must focus on improving your website’s performance and uptime to ensure positive impact on your site visitors.  The key thing is to look for the most common things that websites get wrong and ensure your website does not make those mistakes.  The fact remains that many times, websites focus on exotic issues and neglect the simple mistakes that are preventing good website uptime and good site speed.