Website Performance: Why it Matters and How to Improve Speeds

We often discuss website downtime, why it’s detrimental to your business, what you can do to prevent it, and how to overcome it quickly when it does happen. However, website downtime isn’t the only issue that can have a negative impact on your online business. Website performance issues can hit you just as hard if you aren’t careful. Here we will discuss why website performance is just as important as website uptime, how to improve your site’s speeds, and how website monitoring can help you keep an eye on the performance of your site.

Why Is Website Performance Important?

In the day and age of instant gratification, people are more impatient than ever. If you think your visitors will wait around for 10 seconds or more for your site’s pages to load, guess again. In fact, research shows that many visitors will leave your website if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That doesn’t give you a lot of margin for error in terms of website performance. However, visitors abandoning ship aren’t your only concern if your site isn’t performing up to par. You’ll likely find it hard to rank where you would like to in terms of search engine rankings if your site takes too long to load and doesn’t provide visitors the optimal experience.

So, what can you do if your site isn’t performing the way your visitors expect it to? Fortunately, there are two easy fixes for under-performing websites that are slow to load.

How to Increase Your Website’s Speed

First, you need to focus on image optimization. Images are known as visual assets, but those assets can quickly become detrimental if they affect how quickly your site’s pages are loading. Fortunately, there are some easy ways to ensure that your site’s images aren’t affecting your users’ experience on your site. First, make sure you always use the right file format. Never, ever use TIF files. Use JPG files only for high-quality images. All other images should be in PNG format. You can also compress images down when needed.

The second thing you can do to improve the performance of your website is modify your site’s code. Regardless of what designers and developers may want to do to your site, remember that there is indeed such a thing as too much CSS and JavaScript code. Make sure all of the code on your site is minimized and all unnecessary characters are removed from the code. For example, whitespace characters, comments, and block delimiters can be eliminated and doing so can improve the load time of your website’s pages quite drastically. Just make sure you test any code changes on a test server prior to launching them live as the wrong changes can indeed put your site’s design elements into a tailspin.

Website Monitoring Can Help with More Than Just Downtime

While most people rely on website monitoring to notify them when their sites go down, using it to monitor the performance of your website is equally important. That is why a quality website monitoring service is a must. You need the ability to see detailed response times. Bare-bones services won’t offer this feature. With a quality website monitoring service in place, you won’t only be aware of when your site goes down, but you’ll also be aware when changes need to be made to improve the performance of your website as well.