How to Boost Your Website Performance

by Raul Harman, Guest Contributor

A website is a front store window for a business. The quality of a website directly affects how the customers and visitors see the business and how likely they are to buy from it. That’s why investing in the site’s performance and safety is worth your time and money.

The speed of the website is its most important feature from the customer’s point of view.

Because, for them, the point of the website is to quickly find the information they need and make a purchase.

Minimize HTTP requests
Most of the time lost on loading the site is spent on downloading different pieces of the web page, such as images, spreadsheets, Flash, and alike. That’s why minimizing HTTP requests makes your website faster and more user-friendly. The one rule to follow is: the simpler the better.

In order to make the site load faster, try to use CSS instead of images, combine multiple sheets into one, and reduce scripts by placing them on the bottom of the page. In general, try to streamline the number of elements your page comes in.

Minimize latency with a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A website needs to be filled with all kinds of content in different media. That’s what keeps the visitors engaged and showcases your work and your business from every imaginable perspective. At the same time, that’s what makes the site slow and non-responsive and bothers the visitors the most.

Host your media on a content delivery network and free up to 60 percent of your bandwidth capabilities. The media is hosted on servers from all over the world and it’s being downloaded from those that are adjacent to the site visitor, making the process smoother.

Choose a quality server
The biggest decision you need to make when it comes to website performance is the quality of your server. There are a few things to have in mind, depending on how you plan to use the site and how many visitors you expect.

The first thing you should do is buy domain name and decide on how many subdomains are you going to need. The next important factor is the storage which could overload and crash your whole operation if you don’t have enough of it.

Eliminate unnecessary plugins
Plugins can be a useful feature on a site and provide the visitors with a lot of tasks they could manage without leaving your site. Form-related plugins are especially important for websites that sell things because they let the user enter their information only once and carry on with the use.

However, when there are a lot of them, it slows down the site and makes it unmanageable. Reduce the number of plugins by taking inventory of what you really use and turning off everything else. Minimalism is the best way to go when it comes to web design.

Mobile-friendly
The fact is that most of your visitors won’t be on personal computers, but on mobile devices, since now everyone has more than one of them in their pockets. This is something to think about when designing the site. Have in mind that everything needs to be to scale for a small format of a mobile phone as well as a medium format of a tablet device.

The call-to-action buttons and fill-in forms also need to be adjusted for phones as well. The goal is for the purchase to be simple and easy.

By boosting your website performance, you’re driving up traffic and therefore making money. Try to think about how the site looks to a user before you make the changes.