22 best ways to speed up your website today — Part 2
In the last post, we discussed about how your website could be a big reason for the success or failure of your business online. A great website is a reflection of a great business and this is possible only through continuous optimization and monitoring.
We also came to know about the 11 hacks that could help you potentially improve the overall performance of your website. Let’s look into the next 11 ways by which you can optimize the performance of your website and improve the overall conversions.
12. Reduce server response time and DNS lookups
One of the biggest factors that affects how quickly your page loads is the amount of time your DNS lookup takes. A DNS, or domain name system, is a server with a database of IP addresses and their associated hostnames. When a user types a URL into their browser, a DNS server is the one that translates that URL into the particular IP address that indicates its location online.
A DNS lookup, thus, is the process of a finding a specific DNS record over the internet. You can think of it as your computer looking up a number in a phone book.
For example, let’s say you wanted to visit the URL/website name fyipe.com. You’d type this into your browser — but that means very little to your computer. Your ISP(Internet Service Provider) performs a DNS lookup to find the IP address associated with that URL. It will get an IP address like 61.34.57.158.443, which tells it where to find the site you’re looking for. This step prevents users from needing to memorize long strings of numbers to access information online.
The amount of time this step takes depends on how fast your DNS provider is. If not, it may be time to switch to a faster DNS provider.
13. You can use AJAX for progressive enhancement.
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a technique for using the XHR (XMLHttpRequest) object to fetch data from a web server without refreshing the page where the code is running. AJAX enables a page to display updated data in a section of a page without reconstructing the entire page.
This is often used to respond to user interaction, but it can also enable your application to load a bare-bones version of a page quickly, and then to fill in more detailed content while the user is already viewing the page. This makes the page appear much faster and enhances the overall user experience.
14. Manage 3rd party scripts.
A typical website today contains more than 75 third party scripts running on it. This poses a big threat on the performance of a website but unfortunately it can’t be stopped since they create a lot of value addition as well such as running ads which brings revenue to the business, understanding user behavior using analytics and improving conversions to some extent.
The best way to ensure that this doesn’t create a big threat to the website’s performance is to proactively be alert of its effect on the performance of the website ensuring that it doesn’t lead to a huge degradation in the performance while not generating substantial value addition to compensate for it.
15.Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. This can potentially improve the performance of your website to a great extent especially if your users exist over a wide geography or the traffic on your website is high. If a website is hosted on a particular server, all the traffic visiting the website hits on the same server.
This could result in performance degradation based on the ability of your website as well as the server to handle that amount of traffic. But, this poses a greater threat to performance if your visitors are far away from the server. For example, if a user from UK visits a website having its server hosted in US will suffer significant latency and performance issues compared to a user in US since they are physically very far from the server.
CDN ensures that this doesn’t happen. With a CDN, you cache your site on a global network of servers. When a user’s browser requests files from your site, that request is routed to the closest server.
For example, let’s say your origin server is in California, but uses a CDN to host files globally. Your network might look something like this:
If a user from South Africa visits this website, they won’t experience any extra delay compared to other users since their browser will be able to download files from the nearby server thus mitigating the problem of higher load times.
The best options if you want to start using CDN are MaxCDN and Cloudflare. MaxCDN is a pure CDN, which means that it offers CDN services only. They have more data centers and focus solely on improving load times. Cloudflare, on the other hand, combines CDN service with security and optimization features. The one you choose depends on whether you want those extra features, or just want to focus on improving speed and either way, getting set up is a fairly quick process.
16. Prioritize above the fold loading.
When a webpage loads, the entire webpage doesn’t load at a time. The user wouldn’t experience any significant lack of performance if the part that’s visible to the user first i.e., the top of the webpage is rendered at a time and fast.
This can be done by delaying the loading of the content that is below the initial visible area and quickly loading the content that is “above the fold” i.e., visible to the user at first glance of the website. This creates an illusion of a fast website.
17. Reduce the number of plugins on your website
Plugins can really do a lot to improve the functionality of a website especially if it is created on WordPress. It can be used to create custom functionality, improve user experience, clean up your code, compress the size and a lot more. One of the biggest benefits of having plugins is that they are very easy to install as well.
Since they are so easy to install, people keep installing more and more and more of it without realizing the downside of installing too many plugins.
Large number of plugins on a website decreases its speed, creates a lot of security vulnerability and even causes the website to crash and suffer downtime which then becomes a really tedious task to recover from. Hence removing the plugins that aren’t necessary will improve the website’s performance to a large extent.
The best way is to measure the effect a particular plugin has on the website performance and remove the ones that overlap in functionality or are intended for a task that can be done manually.
18. Reduce the number of redirects.
Redirects are absolutely necessary especially if you need to eliminate issues with broken links or deleted pages but, having a large number of redirects negatively influences the website speed by increasing the number of HTTP requests especially on mobile devices.
Google recommends that the redirects must be eliminated completely but this is a bit unrealistic for most businesses since the content changes continuously and redirects are sometimes absolutely necessary. Hence, the number of redirects, must be reduced to bare minimum.
Tools such as “Screaming frog” can help a lot in quickly getting an idea about the number of redirects on your website and where they are redirecting to. Thus, it gives a clear idea about the redirects that aren’t necessary so that you could remove them and increase the performance of the website multi-fold.
19. Use progress indicators but do it wisely.
Research has proven that progress indicators help improve overall user experience on the result page especially if they are slower. This is essentially because it gives the visitor an illusion of assurance that the result is being loaded and that the page is active and not slow. This also keeps their mind alert of the time that may be remaining before the result appears thus keeps them exited and involved.
20. Monitor the speed of the mobile version of the web-page
As mentioned earlier, since December of 2017, Google has started ranking websites not just on the basis of the speed of the website in desktop mode but primarily on the speed and the user experience quality of the mobile version of the webpage. Hence it more important now to optimize the website so that it performs great on a mobile phone as well.
You can easily start testing it on “Test my site” by Google to know the current loading speed of your website on a mobile phone on 3G network. Within a few seconds it lets you know the current loading time of the mobile version of the website on 3G, which is expected to cover more than 70% of the cellular coverage by 2020 and even benchmarks it with a large number of websites on the internet in a similar domain. It also estimates the percentage of users that you might be losing because of a slow webpage. It might be a staggering value that might surprise you. Given that many of these sites are your competitors’, you’ll want to work towards being a top performer within your industry.
It also provides quick tips and solutions to improve the loading speed by a few seconds immediately.
21. Implement DPM strategies.
It may sound challenging but it isn’t. It’s a onetime investment in terms of policies and implementation strategies but once done, you’ll be on a fast track lane to a successful business with happy customers backing them.
DPM (Digital Performance Monitoring) is a deeper way of looking at what is going on in your digital business in three dimensions:
4. Customer experience
5. IT performance
6. Business outcome
It is a process of monitoring the customer experience by monitoring the IT performance with an intention of driving the desired business outcome. You can read about how to implement the DPM strategies in your business right away from the whitepaper section of Fyipe in detail.
22. Continuously monitor the performance and availability of the website
This is probably one of the most important hack that must be implemented right away. Businesses need to know when their website is performing poorly or when it is suffering downtime much before the user does. Being transparent makes sure that the user trusts your brand and is assured of the quality of the service and care for them.
Downtimes are natural but being continuously alert about it 24x7 is practically nearly impossible on your own and even if done, it would take up huge amount of resources to make sure that the website is available all the time. Tools like Fyipe help business in making sure that they don’t need to worry about it anymore.
They not only monitor the availability of the website & its performance but also monitors the health of the server continuously. If something goes awry or the website suffers a downtime, it emails, sends an SMS, calls the person scheduled to be available at the moment to inform about the incident and provides the best in class service to ensure that problem is resolved fast.
It stays awake, monitors the store front of your business and lets you know if anything seems worrying like a secret guardian 24x7x365. With Fyipe in place you don’t to worry about your website anymore. Tools like Fyipe go a long way in building your brand to be one of most amazing brands in the world.
