Website Performance: A Beginners Guide to Enhancing the Website Performance
If you are the business owner, employee responsible for web presence or the developer working on the website performance for a client, the speed of the website is right up there in terms of delivery of your work. There is long list of things that you can do, and factors that impact which one of those optimisation methods or tweaks will work.
WARNING: This is not an advanced or exhaustive guide, this is a guide for the beginners. I hope it helps you to start the optimization process.
Keeping all those factors aside, there are lot many things that can be managed, i.e. platform/hosting agnostic Website Performance Optimisation techniques. So here are a few of them:
CloudFlare
CloudFlare is available in all cPanel and Plesk based panels, and most of the hosting products have one of the two. It is a ‘Content Delivery Network’, which basically keeps copy of your static content (Images, CSS files, etc.) at different geo-locations across the world. This co-location of content optimises the delivery time of the content, thus reducing the load time of the website. Works wonders if you have a lot of traffic from particular geography.
Varnish Cache
Varnish caching is a web application accelerator, also known as caching HTTP reverse proxy. It will cache the static content of your website and decrease the load time by a factor of up to 1000%. Varnish cache can be enabled by your or connect with the support team to get it activated.
Gzip Compression
Gzip compression works very similar to you sending a compressed zip file to your friend. In this case, instead of sending individual files to the customer’s computer, the server compresses the requested page and sends it to the customer as a single package. The customer’s computer will decompress it and consume. It will reduce no. of server requests by a huge number. This can be enabled through .htaccess file.
Browser Caching
Browser caching works really well, as you are saving some of your files on the customer’s system. This enables you to reduce the no. of http connects as well as data download for your customers, thus reducing the page load times. This method is really effective if your website gets a lot of repeat traffic.
Update Systems
Most of us use CMS to build our websites, and the most popular of them is WordPress. This suggestion applies to all the CMS, themes or plugins out there. Keep them updated. Most of the times, all the developers working on these systems have similar goals, making the systems perform better. So latest releases generally should have better performance.
Optimize Images
Bookmark kraken.io, and make it your best friend. You can reduce your load time by simply passing all your images through Kraken and uploading them again, it will reduce the size of the images. Data saved is customer saved.
HTTP Requests
Each CSS, JS, HTML, or Image is a separate file, which triggers individual http calls, which the server needs to resolve. It is always suggested to keep the number of http calls to the minimum so that the server can focus on multiple customer calls, rather than getting choked on 1000’s of calls for each individual page. You can reduce http requests via combining files, image sprites, etc.
Geo Location of Hosting
The actual physical location of the server matters, the farther it is from most of your traffic, the more the data packets will have to travel to reach the customer’s requesting your website. So, host as close to majority of your traffic as possible. A way around this is getting a good CDN like Cloudflare or Amazon Cloudfront.
Use Gtmetrix
Make Gtmetrix your 2nd best friend. This tool parses your website, passes it through multiple optimisation metrics and gives you a list of things that can be done on your website to optimise the experience and speed. ProTip: Register on Gtmetrix with a free account to keep history of all the tests that you will end up running on Gtmetrix.
LightHouse & PageSpeed
Similar to Gtmetrix, these two tools will help you with suggestions on improving your website performance. They are really good especially if you are optimizing for mobile traffic. The advantage here is that these are integrated inside Chrome Developer tools.
Finishing Statement
Optimizing your website performance is a constant effort, a small part of your team should always be working on optimizing your website/product. Possibly, the team should comprise of members from front-end & back-end development, marketing automation, marketing operations, and content.
BONUS: All these optimizations will help you get rank on Google faster and better.
