Website performance is an often-overlooked aspect of web design, but it has a huge impact on user experience and site traffic. Today’s busy Internet users are impatient and they don’t have the patience for websites that load slowly. If they are unable to get the information, they need within a few seconds of visiting a page, they will quickly abandon your website and search for a faster one. In fact, a single second delay in page load speed can cause you to lose 38% of your conversion rate. This is why optimizing for website performance is crucial to online success. A fast-loading website will help you to achieve higher rankings in organic search, drive more traffic to your pages, and increase user retention.
As a result, improving site speed can help you to generate more revenue for your business. When a page loads slowly, the browser is forced to wait for each request to be sent and then processed. This can add up very quickly, especially if there are lots of requests. It is important to optimize your website for speed by reducing the number of HTTP requests and by using compression. The first step to improving website performance is minifying your JavaScript and CSS files. This process removes unused symbols and shortens the file size, which reduces the overall amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network. Ideally, these files should be combined into a single bundle so that the browser can load them in parallel. Another way to improve performance is to optimize the server-side application logic.
This is a more technical task, but it can make a significant difference in the overall loading time of your page. For example, if your server is slow to respond to queries from the database, you can try to minimize the query times or use a faster database system. Finally, the last step to improving website performance is to optimize the client-side scripts and styles. This involves removing extraneous images, compressing the size of CSS and JavaScript files, and using a content delivery network (CDN) to host your content. In addition to the tips above, you can also run performance tests on your site using tools like Sematext Experience. These will show you the specific areas where your site is wasting valuable seconds and dollars.
A fast-loading website will be more popular with your visitors, have a better SEO ranking, and ultimately, increase your revenue. So if you are not already focused on website speed optimization, it is well worth the effort to do so. After all, you probably spend more time on your website’s visual design and content than on its performance, but a slow-loading site will frustrate your visitors and drive them away. Just think about how impatient you would be if your favorite website had slow load times. That’s why it is important to focus on website speed when you are designing a new site.
