How to improve website performance? 8 Practices to apply!

Experienced E-commerce Agency for Magento/ Adobe Commerce/ Shopify/ Shopware Development

Establishing an e-commerce website plays a vital role in a business’s e-commerce strategy nowadays, due to the rising trend of online shopping. Both efficient and inefficient e-commerce websites can directly influence business in different ways.

A well-performing website, undoubtedly, can bring businesses various benefits, such as great conversion rates, professional brand image, and high engine search ranking,…

Hence, businesses need to focus on tracking and improving website performance. This article will provide you with tremendous and helpful pieces of information about best practices to improve website performance.

What is website performance?
5 Common reasons for website performance issues
How to improve your website performance?
Bonus: How to measure and improve your website’s SEO performance?
Warm-up

What is website performance?

The term “Website performance” indicates the speed of a website loading time on a web browser as well as its usability, interactivity, and reliability. It is a way to measure how effectively a site can deliver and convey critical information to users. Commonly, when it is the initial arrival of customers on the website, they often gauge its quality based on its website performance.

Website Performance Meaning

Poor website performance can negatively affect your business by driving your customers away while good website performance can benefit your business with numerous advantages.

Website performance can be characterized by its speed, bounce rate, error rate, conversion rate, and a lot more. Tracking and improving website performance is indispensable to maintaining business sustainability and growth.

5 Common reasons for website performance issues

The first and foremost way to improve website performance for businesses is to identify and examine the root causes of issues they are encountering, thus finding solutions for them.

Performing a core issues analysis will provide businesses with clues that assist them in resolving problems most efficiently.

Many components make up a website’s performance issues. The summary below will highlight 5 common reasons for website performance issues that will make the research process more attainable for businesses.

Poorly written code

Poorly written code is considered the main factor that contributes to low website performance. It can be understood as superfluous code that is poorly optimized, written unnecessarily, and difficult to understand, maintain, as well as extend.

Poorly Written Code Can Affect Website Performance

Superfluous code often results from excessive features coded to the website such as chatbots, widgets, and visual animations, … that work simultaneously.

These codes often lack readability, structure, and adherence to coding best practices. They can put businesses at a disadvantage by deteriorating website quality, providing terrible customer experiences, and raising customer complaints.

Inefficient databases

An inefficient database is a database system that does not take full advantage of computer resources and can not function at its peak in terms of performance, resource utilization, and responsiveness. It may display numerous problems that hold back its effectiveness in storing, retrieving, and manipulating data.

Businesses can identify an inefficient database by some common signals including slow speed, poor indexing, high resource consumption, inefficient query plans, and more.

Even a small error in data quality can be detrimental to the website and make the site almost useless for users. As a result, understanding and acknowledging the effect of inefficient databases is very important for businesses.

Large file sizes

In this digital time, graphic content is pretty much a requirement when creating a website due to its impact and engagement. People are becoming less likely to read long paragraphs for information, instead, they prefer to attain it faster and easier through visual content.

Visual-rich media namely video, picture, graphic, or infographic is displayed frequently on many websites because it can enhance messaging and further ensure it resonates with users.

However, visual content can slow the website down and reduce the capacity of website performance due to its large file sizes. To optimize file sizes as well as ensure website performance, we must consider using the right image formats, making sure image dimensions are suited to their website/CMS, and compressing files before uploading.

Traffic spikes

Traffic spikes refer to a situation in which a business witness a significant increase or decrease in traffic above the normal level. Large traffic fluctuations often occur during key trading events such as during sales and holidays or the launch of a limited-edition product range.

Traffic Spike Slower Website Performance

People often misunderstood that a sharp rise in website traffic can bring their business more advantages and customers. On the opposing, an unexpected traffic fluctuation can cause site outages, unhappy customers, and a reduction in profits if the website is not optimized for high traffic.

To cope with traffic spike situations, it is a must for websites to have powerful servers and a well-functioning system for recording spikes in traffic — at a minimum.

Lack of performance monitoring

Performance monitoring is a practice of tracking, and analyzing, thus testing the efficiency of a website’s performance to know if the website works well or not. When you monitor the website’s performance, you can describe a visual representation of the online business operation.

If a website is not monitored frequently, there will be little likelihood that businesses be aware of the issues they are facing at the right time as well as resolve problems right away. They may also lose the chance to prevent them before they cause major issues.

Businesses can consider some tools for digital performance monitoring including dashboards and alert systems – for example. By applying those suggested tools to keep track of the website performance on time, businesses can reduce the risk of performance issues and take action if sudden changes occur.

How to improve your website performance?

Implementing useful tips to improve website performance is a major task for businesses if they want to provide customers with the best experience. Let’s get a look at some helpful tips to enhance your website performance.

1. Analyze root causes

Before starting to tackle any issues, businesses must prioritize finding the reason why they appeared and happened. This is also applicable in the situation of a slow-performing website.

To determine the most suitable, corrective, and remedial actions for website performance problems, businesses need to get to the bottom of the main reason and then set up performance-monitoring tools along with automatic optimization.

One other option is to employ a cloud platform that offers automated scalability and redundancy. By looking over fundamental causes, businesses will be more likely to reduce the risk of inefficient website performance.

2. Improve code and SEO

Code and SEO are one of the most crucial factors that businesses can’t ignore if they want to change their website performance more effectively.

A well-written code equals good website performance, speeds up page load time, and leads to a superior user experience. A good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results in a higher website rank and more free traffic. This, undoubtedly, benefits businesses.

Businesses can apply practices such as Optimize Title Tags, Add Image Alt Text to Each Image on the website, Use Keywords, Minimize Redirects, and Remove Broken Links to improve code and SEO, thus faster their website performance.

3. Compress images

Many websites often use heavy visual content namely images, videos, graphics, and more. This results in a slowdown in website performance because images are not compressed and optimized, hence leading to unnecessary bandwidth consumption and extending loading times for visitors.

A key solution for this situation is to correct image sizes usually. Optimizing image sizes as well as responsiveness for mobile users can bring a great improvement in website loading times.

Moreover, businesses need to ensure that the correct file is used. For example, we should use JPEG for images with lots of colors (e.g., photos), and use PNG for simpler graphics.

4. Use content delivery network (CDN)

A content delivery network, a so-called content distribution network, is a network that distributes proxy servers along with their data centers across various geographical locations, to end users. This is a service designed especially for the process of serving static files to be less tricky.

Content Delivery Network

CDNs take charge of optimizing the process of transporting static files namely CSS, images, fonts, and JavaScript - for example, to your visitors. Because CDN is a geographically distributed server, the files will be served by the server that is geographically nearest to the visitor, and users who are physically far from the server will not experience an increase in loading time.

The loading time will be the same, regardless of where the user is connecting.

5. Display only necessary features

A common mistake is to display all the data related to all the products in the list, even though they are optional. This can hamper website performance and result in slow experiences for visitors.

As a result, we need to consider carefully to make sure that only what is needed is shown on a webpage. For example, when it comes to the listing page, only a proportion of the total product is sufficient to display.

This will help customers easily navigate the website and find what they need faster.

6. Implement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

Due to the widespread of smartphones and other mobile devices, access to applications from mobile gadgets has become more and more convenient and prominent. The excessive availability of devices coupled with the volatile networks on mobile devices, makes it difficult to maintain steady application performance.

Implement AMP Is Necessary To Improve Web Performance

Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP) is a framework that aims to provide users with smooth experiences on any device, regardless of their type. AMP facilitates end-user experience by altering the rendering process of the page.

Implementing AMP can result in a cut down in page overhead and streamline page load processes, thus ensuring end-users an excellent experience.

7. Increase storage capacity

Storage capacity represents the volume of data that a web server is capable of managing at any given time. It can be characterized by the amount of memory, storage, and processing power that the web server hold.

Increasing storage capacity is one of the most common ways to upgrade a slow-performing website. By decreasing the page weight, website load time will decline, which will lead to faster download times for the site’s pages.

This is important for businesses because it has significant effects on how quickly websites can respond to requests from users. Insufficient storage capacity can result in an overwhelming of incoming traffic that a website has to receive, thus causing slow loading speeds and inferior performance.

8. Test and monitor website performance

The first step to attain the improvement of website performance is to measure it. Ongoing monitoring is a must for businesses because it will make them stay alert to the degradation of their website and keep them up to date with the improvement of website performance.

There are two ways to approach website monitoring: synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring. Moreover, a cloud-based website monitoring tool is also a great choice because you can divert your attention toward growing your business instead of building or managing your tools.

Testing and monitoring website performance regularly are significantly important if a business wants to improve website performance.

You can also trust experts in testing and monitoring your website performance. By using Mageplaza’s service, you can make sure that your site will improve better. Our Magento 2 Speed & Performance Optimization Service will help you:

Analyze your website to evaluate its current status
Optimize Magento core
Fix & optimize third-party extensions & themes
Rewrite previous customizations
Improve your site scalability

IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE PERFORMANCE NOW

Bonus: How to measure and improve your website’s SEO performance?

Improving website SEO performance is a gradual process that can extend over a significant duration, and its results may take time too. To achieve long-term success, the process may require a business to optimize techniques, create content, and remain a consistent monitoring process.

There are various techniques involved in the process of measuring and improving a website’s SEO performance. Here are the highlight of 4 main steps:

1. Keyword research

Businesses need to identify relevant keywords and phrases that are most likely to be searched by their target audience. Thus, utilizing keyword research tools to find popular and high-traffic keywords related to the website’s content is also very important.

2. On-Page optimization

To improve SEO performance, businesses need to optimize their website pages for targeted keywords. This includes optimizing meta tags (title tags, meta descriptions), headings, URLs, and content. Furthermore, web content must be valuable, well-structured, and readable by both users and search engines.

3. Technical SEO

The key solution is to pay attention to the technical aspects of a website, such as its speed, mobile responsiveness, robots.txt file, and URLs. Optimizing a website’s performance must be a priority to ensure quick loading times and a smooth user experience.

4. User experience (UX)

Businesses need to focus on providing a seamless and user-friendly experience to their website visitors. The website must be easily navigated and can offer relevant, engaging content. A positive user experience, undoubtedly, will bring improvement to your website’s SEO performance.