One of the most important and popular strategies for website optimization has always been Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But if a company doesn’t improve its website’s performance, all of the meta descriptions, backlinks, and high-quality content won’t matter. Whenever a potential customer lands on a company’s website and finds that the page takes too long to load, or that the images aren’t correctly displayed, they’re going to close the window and choose to purchase from a competitor. That’s one of the biggest reasons why companies have to improve their website performance. The performance of a website can be measured by the speed at which the website loads and displays all the content on it. This is a part of the user experience, and it’s one of the essential elements of any company’s digital success.
Website performance can be measured by a number of metrics, such as the size of the downloaded web pages, the page load time, or the number of server errors that pop up. Companies that have a slow website tend to suffer from unhappy customers, damaged reputation, abandoned shopping carts, low rankings in SERPs, and lost conversions.
Image Sizes
One of the most important factors in terms of website performance is their images. The reason for that is that larger images result in a heavier page weight, which means it takes more time for the website to load. When a company takes the time to optimize its images, there are other website performance elements that also improve alongside that, such as user experience and loading time. A general rule for image optimization is to use them sparingly, crop them so that they don’t go over the boundaries of the screen, use image compression tools, and use a page ruler to get precise dimensions for the website.
HTTP Requests
The fundamental building block of the internet is HTTP requests, which allow web browsers to request data from servers and then display that data on a webpage. The simplest way to explain HTTP request is that whenever someone visits a website, their browsers send out an HTTP request to the website’s server, asking for data. Then, the server sends back all of the required information to be displayed on the page, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code, and images. For a website to load faster, there shouldn’t be a large number of HTTP requests from a browser to the server. The best ways to reduce those requests are to optimize JavaScript and CSS files, merge multiple JavaScript files, and reduce the size of the images.
Redirects
Another issue that can slow down a website’s performance is redirecting, which takes users from one page to another. When a website has too many redirects, or if some of those redirects take users to pages that don’t exist, that website will rank lower in SERPs and will be slower to load. The way to solve this issue is by removing any old redirects, adding canonical tags that help manage duplicate content, and implementing a 301 permanent redirect. This type of permanent redirect is when a company tells the search engine that a new page should be used instead of an old one, and all traffic will be redirected to that new page.