What Is Website Performance and Why Is It Important?
Once a business is able to have its own website developed by a web development company, they think the job is done. However, now comes the time where we need to assess the performance of the website which is a crucial step in the testing phase. It not only affects the initial image of the business but also affects the visitor’s experience along with sales.
What is Website Performance?
It is a one-for-all term, it refers to a couple of different factors such as, how efficiently it is working and how much time it takes to load the website pages? These factors may seem unimportant but are of crucial importance in real. If the website is taking too much time to load then, there’s a huge chance that you will lose your potential visitor and you cannot convert a lead into sales.
Why Website Performance is Important
According to Google even if the website page takes an extra half a second to load leads to a 20% drop in traffic. Hence, openly telling all businesses and website owners that the loading speed of a page directly affects the ranking of your business and website.
Another most important factor that affects the performance of a website is its accessibility through all devices. If your website is only accessible via laptops or desktops and is not accessible on smartphones or tablets, then there’s a high chance that you’ll lose your visitors.
What Affects Website Performance?
There are several factors and points that affect website performance. Let’s dive into a few of them;
Responsiveness
Responsiveness means whether your website is developed to be viewed in any type or size of a device. As mentioned earlier, we all use smartphones nowadays, so it has become a necessity to make sure that a website is accessible on mobile phones as well. Now, most of the website themes are originally made for all types of devices, at the testing phase of a website, all you have to use your browser’s developer to make sure your website is responding to all devices and how it looks on various types of devices.
Page Size and Compression
This is another aspect that should be kept in mind while developing a website. If your website page contains heavy or large files then, naturally it will take a lot of time to load that page. Website development companies use different tools such as website plugins to compress the page size.
Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is an effective way to manage longer web pages, for example, you can make the later information to appear a bit slower in order to speed up the long pages. If web pages include lots of images, for instance, in sales products pages, you must have noticed a tab in the end of pages” load more”, it is usually to fix the speed of long web pages.
Quick Fixes for Page Speed
Below are some of the best tips that will ensure that you are able to achieve a faster website:
Get a web hosting package that not only provide hosting services, but also 1 gigabyte of RAM.
Choose a web hosting provider that offers website caching that will sort out all issues and also provides support in order to install the latest technology i.e. PHP.
Avoid using too many plugins and use the one with good reviews.
Web pages should have images scaled up to the required size.
Try to include videos on your website from a third party, such as YouTube, etc. instead of uploading them by yourself on your website.
