8 Basic Tips to Improve Your Website Performance

Introduction

Performance is one of the key factors for the success of a website. You may create great content with highly relevant topics, but if visitors wait to see the content, the website is not optimized for performance. As a result, the website will lose visitors and consequently lose revenue and reputation. So, website performance improvement should be addressed with high priority by experienced developers and SEO experts. By performance, we mean how fast the web page gets loaded for the users to view.

Why do we need to Improve Performance of a Website?

A faster website gives a great user experience. No website owners expect visitors to wait patiently to see the content. Improved user experience adds value to the website and helps the company grow its business. Obviously, we want to increase website traffic. While there are many factors for a website's success, performance is the one that needs additional knowledge on SEO as well as experts who can analyze various factors that impact performance and take necessary steps to address them.

Some Basic Tips to Improve Website Performance

While many factors affect the website's performance, we will talk about a few basic tips that need to be in place before someone does a detailed analysis to address the performance issue. Let's talk about them.

1. 1. Minimize Number of HTTP Requests

   Each HTTP request involves a request from the browser and a response from the server with network traffic. So, the more the number of requests, the more is the time required to get the requested data. So, one should review all HTTP requests and try to reduce them.

2. 2. Use CDNs

   CDN (Content Delivery Network) helps to improve the response by using the servers in multiple locations and using the one that provides the least waiting time. So, it is always better to use CDN whenever possible to ensure performance improvement of the website.

3. 3. Minify CSS and JavaScript

   First of all, review your custom CSS files and JavaScript files to identify unused styles and scripts. Do you really need all these styles? Are these styles being used at all? Are you unnecessarily creating a bigger CSS file? Remove them after proper checking. You must ensure they are redundant and not required. Finally, minify the CSS files and JavaScript files. There are many online tools available to minify them. The files will be reduced in size. It may not be a significant reduction in size but still, it is always better to do this.

4. 4. Remove Duplicate Scripts

   Verify all programs in HTML, PHP, JavaScript and any other code you may use for the website. Identify duplicates, unwanted or redundant codes that really are not required and remove them. This exercise will reduce the size of the file and you will have clean code easier for maintenance.

5. 5. Remove Errors from JavaScripts

   Check if your JavaScript gives an error in the console. Incorrect JavaScript makes the web page slower. Verify, if you really need them, if the scripts are required then eliminate the errors.

6. 6. Reduce Use of Web Fonts

   Use only the required fonts, no need to load fonts that are not used.

7. 7. Optimize the Images

   • Use the correct size of images instead of scaling them in HTML. You must check the size of each image used, and resize them as required on the web page.
   • Compress all images by using an image compressing tool. You can see many such tools online. This will reduce the size of images. Obviously, the larger the image size, the more time it will take to load on the web page.
   • If applicable, use lazy loading for the images that are outside of the user's viewport. This means the image will be loaded only when users scroll down to the required section of the page where the image resides. If a user does not scroll to a section of the web page, images in that section do not get loaded. This will make the web page load faster.

8. 8. Optimize The Database

   • If the website uses a database and complex SQL statements are used, let the DBA do a performance tuning of the SQL statements. If the website is supposed to work on a high volume of data, it is imperative that the SQL statements be analyzed for any performance issues.
   • Make sure, you are using indexes wherever required based on the where conditions used in the SQL statements.
   • Avoid improper joins between tables, it will lead to cross-product and fetch unnecessary data not required by the program.
   • If the database grows to a high volume of data, review the old data, if they are actively being used, otherwise consider archiving them.
   For all these database activities, it is better to discuss with the DBA and decide accordingly.

Conclusion

We have discussed a few basic tips required to improve the performance of a website. There are many other areas to look into regarding the performance. The points discussed in this topic are to be implemented for an initial analysis before we move to many other areas of performance improvement of a website. You can use PageSpeed Insights or Ahrefs SEO Tools & Resources for further analysis of your website.