Optimizing Website Performance: Best Practices for Faster Load Times

 

In today's era, if your website's performance isn’t Ideal, then it could be one of the most frustrating things that your users could experience. This could become a huge problem if not taken care of — In order to avoid higher bounce rates and lower search engine engine ratings, One must definitely invest in optimizing their website’s performance. By optimizing your website, you can attract more customers to your website thus resulting in higher traffic and more conversion rates.

In this article, we will be exploring different aspects to optimize your website performance. We will be :

• Understanding different performance metrics to measure the performance of your website

• Discussing best practices & techniques for improving website load times.

• Exploring advanced optimization techniques like browser caching, lazy loading and many more.

• Exploring different tools that can help you monitor or enhance website performance.

Understanding Website Performance Metrics

1. Website Speed

When you think about "What must be an ideal speed for a website?", most of the time the thing you might only consider is how fast a page loads. But there’s much more to it than that meets the eye. In today's era, people have shorter attention spans than ever and it’s crucial to know how your site performs in different speed-related aspects:

Time to Title :

This is the time taken by a website when a visitor request's your website and the time it takes to load the site’s title on the browser tab. If the site's title appears quickly, then this gives the users a sense of trust and reassures visitors that this site is a legitimate and trustworthy website.

Time to Start Render:

After searching a website The worst experience you could provide to your user is when the website buffers a lot and you can not even see a single bit of content. This measures how long it takes for any content to appear on the screen after a user requests your site. Nobody likes to wait and if your website provides the users what they are searching for within a fraction of seconds then they are more likely to stay.

Time to Interact:

 This is the time from when a visitor first requests your site to when they can actually start interacting with it (like clicking on links or scrolling). The quicker they can engage, the more likely they are to stick around.

To start improving your site speed, focus on these three metrics. You can check them using free web page speed test tools.

Key Metrics For Website Speed

2. Number of Assets

“Assets” are the building blocks of your webpage, including text, images, videos, and more. Each of these elements adds to your page’s load time. The more assets you have, the slower your page might load. Tools are available to help you analyze the size of these assets, and if they’re dragging down your load speed, consider hosting them externally.

3. Error Rate

This metric measures the ratio of error produced by your site against normal requests received by your site. If you see a rise in errors, then that could indicate a potential problem that could bring your site down if not addressed. When you keep a check on your error rate, error prevention and correction is done before it escalates into any disruptive events.

4. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate represents the percentage of individuals that visit your website and leave after a very short time span, more precisely – in the first session. A very high bounce rate could be a threat, not only for your conversion rates but also to your SEO as it portrays your site is not offering what the visitors are looking for. The percentage of the visitors that exit after viewing the first page of the site, is known as the bounce rate and this can be discovered with the help of Google Analytics, the steps are quite simple – Open google analytics, under Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages – Here you can see the entire report of your website. Now, you just have to scroll down inorder to see the bounce rates of individual pages. 

 

How To Check Bounce Rate

5. Unique Visitors

Unique visitors denote the daily, weekly or monthly total number of unique people that access the website from different browsers. This metric is the key to measure the growth of our website. While, there is no doubt that repeated visitors are of major importance too, but an increasing amount of unique visitors indicates that you’re bringing in fresh audiences to your website.

6. Traffic Source

Traffic Sources indicate the medium through which users have come to your website. In this context, the amount of traffic to a website and its origin is important, and knowing where the visitors are coming from is as critical as knowing how much traffic one gets. This also makes it possible to determine whether your visitors are coming from organic searches, via social media, or referrals. Ideally, your traffic should come from different sources – If the traffic is weighted heavily towards any one of the sources, then some form of content strategy revision might be called for to focus on the sources which are bringing maximum traffic to the website. 

Fun fact : You can monitor all this in Google Analytics under Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

7. Conversion rate

This is also termed as a conversion rate which is defined as how well the site’s visitors are converted into customers or leads generated. In the case of getting huge traffic and low conversion rates, this probably indicates that the conversion strategies of the site could have better yield than they presently achieve. For Google Analytics then, this data can be accessed under Conversions > Overview.

8. Top Pages

Page performance is also important so the pages that are performing better must be taken extra care. These could be pages that have either the highest percentage of conversions, or the highest/latest volume of visitors. Knowing which pages are doing well and why? helps you to make those existing pages of your site to do well based on the research you have of the existing high performing pages. Top pages can be monitored in Google Analytics through Landing Pages and Exit Pages under Behavior > Site Content.

Landing Pages:

These are the pages that users first enter on your website. These pages are frequently labeled as ‘First Impression Pages’ and as such they cannot be taken for granted even for an instance and must be in great shape.

Exit Pages:

These pages are the last pages which a visitor views immediately before leaving the website. As these pages are detrimental to the retention time of visitors, it’s necessary to acknowledge them and improve.

9. Keyword Ranking

Keyword ranking indicates the effectiveness of a particular website for a particular query to the search engines. While a drop in ranking can be scary, as long as the keywords are routinely monitored and updated, you can rest assured that your efforts to improve SEO are not in vain. Also, there are various tools used for monitoring keyword rankings.

Improve Keyword Ranking Fast

10. Average Session Duration

This refers to the average time spent by the visitors on your website during a single session. Longer sessions suggest greater willingness of users to buy your product or use your service. While analyzing this metric, businesses must understand the type of their website – For instance, the duration of a news website might have a shorter average session compared to an e-commerce website, because the readers might quickly go through the articles and move on.

How can average session duration be increased?

Methods to Extend Average Session Duration and Improve User Engagement:

Produce content that can pique the interest of your target audience and is relevant to them. Add videos, quizzes, and other engagement-oriented elements to motivate users to spend more time on your website.

Improve the overall usability and performance by optimizing the overall navigation and the entire user interface of your website. Make sure the website carries simple and fast navigation, hardly any loading time, and little to no technical problems that may lead to users leaving out of frustration.

Instead of making decisions based on pure instincts, Use information from analysis for more effective targeting and to make the user experience much better. In-depth understanding of your website can enhance the quality of the interactions with users through persuasive messaging on relevant topics, content, and products leading to spending more time on the site.

Boost Average Session Duration with Engaging Content

Best Practices for Improving Website Load Times

Improving website load times is really important for both the scenarios, whether you want to give a great user experience to your users or you want to get better search engine rankings. Because when a website functions well and loads fast, more visitors are likely to stay, scroll through your website and ultimately interact with the content whereas if the site is slow, then users tend to get frustrated and leave the website resulting in higher bounce rates. Below are some of the common measures that can help reduce loading time on a website:

1. Optimize Images

Images have always been the bulkiest files on any web page, and if no optimization is undertaken, then there is no denying that your website and pages will take ages to load. But images can be optimized by following this :

• Use the correct format:

The correct image formats should be used instead of choosing just any format, Use JPEGs for photos, PNGs for graphics with fewer colors, and SVG for scalable vector graphics. WebP is another modern format, which offers much superior compression for images as well as vector graphics.

• Compress images:

 Reducing size of the images while keeping the quality could be achieved with the help of compression tools or plugins such as TinyPNG, ImageOptim or inbuilt ones in WordPress.

• Use Responsive Images:

 Use appropriately sized images based on the user’s device, so that the user doesn't load heavy pictures on the phone without any cause.

• Lazy load Images:

 In lazy load we do not load images which the user will not see on the first section of the webpage. Lazy loading works in such a way that when the user interacts with a particular section and he needs resources – only then the browser will request resources. This technique reduces the overall page load time by minimizing unnecessary resource downloads.

2. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

When developers write code, it usually contains extra spaces, comments, and formatting for readability. Minification removes these unnecessary elements, shrinking file sizes.

• CSS: Tools like CSSNano or csso can minimize your CSS files.

• JavaScript: Use tools like UglifyJS or Terser to compress JavaScript.

• HTML: HTML can also be minified with tools like HTMLMinifier.

Many website platforms or build systems (like Webpack or Gulp) offer built-in options to automate this.

3. Enable Browser Caching

What is Browser Caching?

When someone visits your website then their browser needs to download some files from your server to display your webpage. These files can include various stuff:

• Images like photos, icons or logos

• CSS files which controls the styling and layout of your entire website

• JavaScript files which helps user to interact with different elements on your website

Key Steps in Browser Caching

 

If browser caching isn't enabled then every time the user visits your website then their browser has to download all these files again and again that we have mentioned above, and this will result in slowing down the load time of your website, especially if there are some files (like the logo or CSS styles) which you will rarely change. One of the solution's to this problem is Browser caching, It allows the browser to save or “cache” some of these files locally (on the user’s device).

So that when the user revisits your website then the browser can load the files from its cache instead of downloading them all over again, strategies like this makes the site load much faster.

Setting Expiration Headers

Browsers don’t just automatically know how long they should store cached files. This is where expiration headers come in. You can exactly tell the browser that for how long the files must be stored into the user's system before the browser needs to recheck and download the files again with the server.

The files that rarely change like images or style sheets can have a longer expiration period(e.g, maybe upto 1 year). Here, the expiration period means that the browser won't redownload the files for a year. The browser will be using the locally saved files, each time the user visits.

And for the files that change frequently over time (For instance, If you have an E-commerce website then your products or the content and banners on the website), you can set a relatively shorter expiration period.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that are located in different parts of the world. As per its name suggests, When you use a CDN then all the static files of your website like images, CSS, and JavaScript are cached(stored) on the servers that are closest to your users.

4. Reduce HTTP Requests

When your website loads, the browser has to download a lot of different files like CSS, JavaScript, and images. And each file requires a separate HTTP request that can slow down your website, especially when there are too many files. If you optimize your website by reducing the number of HTTP requests then these efforts can make your website load a lot faster.

How Can I Reduce HTTP Requests?

Steps To Reduce HTTP Requests

Combine Files:

Merge all the CSS files into one and also do the same for JavaScript files as well. By doing so the browser will avoid making several requests for separate files, rather it will prefer to download one larger file instead.

Use CSS Sprites:

 Combine several small images like different icons into one large image. Now, the browser will make a single request instead of making multiple requests – Use CSS to display only that specific part of the large image that you want to, strategies like these will significantly reduce the number of image requests thus will make your site load faster.

So, In a nutshell if you somehow manage to reduce the number of HTTP requests whenever someone visits your website, then there is no doubt that you can significantly speed up your website's loading time.

5. Implement Gzip Compression

Gzip is one of the most popular compression methods that is used to compress and transfer server files to the user's browser. Gzip shrinks the size of the files upto 70 percent and thus saving time when the browser downloads the files — resulting in faster loading times.

Most of the web servers such as Apache, Nginx, or IIS have GZip compression feature. Gzip on the server can be usually enabled by changing the .htaccess file or server configuration.

Try to figure out what compressions your server provides, In order to get an understanding of this , you might need to visit the documentation provided by your hosting provider. Apart from Gzip there are other data compression methods as well, like Brotli & Deflate. Brotli is used by about 39 percent of websites.

6. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

As mentioned above, CDN helps you distribute your website’s files all around the world across multiple servers. CDNs like Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, or Fastly serve files from the nearest location to the user, reducing load times.

Distribute assets globally:

 The CDN mirrors your assets (like images, JavaScript, CSS) across their servers, reducing the distance between the user and your content.

7. Reduce Server Response Time

The server response time is defined to be how long it takes your server to respond to a request from the browser. In other words, a slow server can become a bottleneck in the loading process.

Host on faster servers:

 Change to a better hosting service such as from shared web hosting to a VPS or cloud hosting.

Utilize features like caching:

Some cache systems have to be implemented on a server side (such as WordPress plugins W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache) that will keep a copy of your site’s files on the user's system providing quicker load times.

Optimize the database queries:

The most crucial point of optimizing websites that are dynamic is the database queries, they have to be designed to be efficient for the dynamic site.

8. Defer or Async Loading for JavaScript

JavaScript can block the rendering of a webpage because the browser must download and execute it before continuing to load other elements. To improve performance:

• Defer JavaScript:

 This allows the HTML to load before the JavaScript is executed.

• Async JavaScript:

This helps your page load faster by allowing the JavaScript to load in the background without delaying the rest of the page from showing up. By adding the defer or async attributes into the script tags, you can be assured that your JavaScript doesn’t slow down the overall loading of the page.

9. Reduce the Use of Redirects

Every redirect adds additional HTTP requests and response times, which can slow down the overall page load. Minimize the number of redirects, especially unnecessary or broken ones.

• Fix broken links:

Ensure all internal links lead directly to the final page and aren't redirecting you to a 404 page.

• Limit mobile redirects:

 If you have a mobile-specific version of your site, consider using responsive design instead of redirecting users to a separate mobile URL.

10. Preload Key Resources

Preloading provides an advantage to the browser by making it possible to load some critical components early enough before they are required hence aiding in the process of rendering them.

• Preload CSS and fonts:

<link rel="preload”> should be used in the HTML code for crucial CSS, fonts, and other resources that need to be loaded in advance.

• Preconnect for external resources:

 External resources e.g. CDN, Google Fonts etc. can be pre-prefetched using <link rel="preconnect">, preconnect can establish a network connection early to speed up the loading process.

Conclusion

It is important to understand that optimizing your website's performance is crucial in order to provide fast, efficient, and a user-friendly experience to the visitors. Adherence to the best practices provided in this blog will make it possible to reduce load times, improve user satisfaction, and boost your site’s search engine rankings. Keep in mind that, optimization of a website is not a one-time task but rather it's an ongoing process, therefore you need to keep checking your optimizations and update the website as required in order to maintain optimal speed and efficiency.