How to Improve Your Website Performance

You’re a writer with a unique perspective, eager to share your thoughts with the world through a blog. Perhaps you’re a budding entrepreneur ready to launch a platform where clients can view and purchase your products. In both cases, website performance is a crucial factor that affects your website’s success. How your website performs can be the difference between a customer taking a desired action, like purchasing an item or moving on to a competitor.

This article defines website performance, outlines its importance, highlights its elements, expounds on the negative outcomes of not prioritising it and provides steps on how to optimise website performance.

Why is Website Performance Important for Online Businesses?

Website performance is crucial to a business’s reputation, customer retention and revenue. If your website performs well, users enjoy the speed and efficiency with which they receive service, making them more likely to return to your website and recommend it to others.

A study looking into the effects of experiencing delays while using mobile devices found that the stress levels an individual feels when experiencing these delays are similar to what they feel when solving a math problem or watching a horror movie. Enhancing website performance prevents your current and future customers from experiencing this, which benefits your brand.

What does website performance mean?

Website performance is the objective measurement of how well a website responds to a user’s requests on a web browser. This essentially means how long it takes a user to access a specific page on a website. Some of the factors that contribute to website performance are:

• Page speed: The time it takes for your website to load on a browser.
• Website scaling: The process of enhancing your website to accommodate and handle more data and traffic while meeting users’ demands.
• Deployment downtime: The period during which your website is down due to updates.

Here are some of the reasons why website performance is vital for your business:

User experience

Ensuring a positive user experience across different devices, such as mobile phones, personal computers and tablets, is paramount. 79% of users claim they wouldn’t engage with content if it doesn’t load or display well on their devices. This emphasises the importance of ensuring your website loads and runs quickly on various devices. A seamless user experience encourages repeat visits and boosts customer retention, sales and profitability.

Conversion rates

A conversion rate is a percentage that indicates how many website visitors take a desired action. For example, if 1000 people visited your website and 50 purchased an item, your conversion rate would be 5%. However you want to define a conversion, ensuring that your website performs well is vital because its performance affects a customer’s actions and your website’s conversion rates.

Website visitor retention

One of your goals is likely to obtain and keep your visitors’ attention when they visit your website. If your website takes too long to load, customers are likely to get tired or impatient and move on to a different site—nearly 90% of users switch to a different site after a poor user experience. Improving your website performance makes it faster and more convenient for users to visit your website and take desired actions, making them likely to return to your website in the future.

Brand perception

Your website is a representation of your brand. Users judge a website’s credibility by its design 75% of the time, which means that if your website doesn’t load quickly and provide an easy user experience, you’re likely to lose sales and experience a reduction in customer retention. Improving your website performance helps you show clients that your business is active, legitimate and secure, which enhances your brand perception.

What elements influence the website’s performance?

Explore the following elements that influence your website’s performance:

Page speed

Page speed is the time your website takes to load on a browser, so users can access and use it. The server you use to host the site and the size of the files and images on your website can affect your website’s speed. The ideal page speed is about 1 to 2 seconds, after which more than 50% of people typically abandon pages. Google has included website speed as one of the determinants of the search ranking algorithm. This means that the speed with which your website loads can be the reason why your website ranks highly or low.

A high rank on search engines means your website is more visible to users, leading to more clicks, conversions and desired actions from site visitors. Therefore, improving your website’s page speed enhances your search engine optimisation or SEO (the process of improving your website so that it ranks highly on a search engine results page).

Website scalability

Website scalability is the process of improving your website to accommodate large volumes of traffic, data and increased user demand more effectively. This means that your website will be able to handle visits and actions from several users simultaneously without crashing or slowing down. Think of it as a way to prepare for your website’s success. You may start with a few customers taking desired actions on your website, but as time passes, you’ll likely bring in new clients.

As your website grows, it’s essential that it continues to run smoothly, especially during sales or when offering discounts. Ensuring your site can handle fluctuating traffic while maintaining fast loading times is critical to keeping customers satisfied and loyal.

Deployment downtime

Deployment downtime is the period during which website owners or developers launch new features and updates to existing sites. If you have prolonged downtimes, your visitors may feel frustrated waiting for the page to load. Lengthy deployment downtimes can also prevent visitors from accessing your site completely, which can lead them to competitor sites. To prevent this, consider employing zero downtime deployment, a strategy that allows website owners to roll out updates without interruptions.

Results that show a negative impact on performance

Failing to focus on website performance has a negative effect on your website’s growth. It reduces the number of visitors to your website, decreasing the number of desired actions users could take, including purchases, subscriptions and other interactions. Here are some of the consequences of not addressing the elements that influence website performance:

Cost increments

If you don’t improve your website performance, you’re likely to incur higher costs over time. For instance, if you don’t optimise your website’s deployment downtime, this can lead to the website slowing down over time due to a buildup of bugs. The website may also crash if you have a high influx of visitors but no website scalability – meaning your website can’t handle many visitors simultaneously. Fixing these issues can raise your costs significantly, making your website less profitable.

Similarly, if your page speed is longer than 3 seconds (53% of website visits get dropped if the page takes three or more seconds to load), it’s likely that users will find competitive websites. This will lead to your website losing conversions, which means you’ll make fewer sales over time.

SEO decline

SEO is crucial because it directly affects your website’s visibility and conversion rates. If you don’t improve your website, search engines like Google might not rank the site highly, so fewer people will see what you offer. This will likely lead to less traffic on your site, affecting your sales, customer retention and profitability. It will also affect your brand perception – users are more likely to trust high-ranking websites.

If your website moves up the search engine rank by one point, your click-through rate (the rate at which people click on your website) increases by 32.3%. In addition, if your website moves from the second to the first position on a search engine like Google, you can get up to 74.5% more clicks. These figures show the importance of prioritising SEO in your website performance.

Poor brand perception

If your website takes too long to load, has a scalability issue or is unavailable due to prolonged downtime, it will impact your brand perception negatively. 79% of users would not engage with content if it takes too long to load on their devices. This would affect your brand perception because users would likely search for competitors with better websites.

Customers are also less likely to recommend your website if it has poor design and performance. 57% of people wouldn’t recommend websites with poor design on mobile phones. This shows the importance of maintaining and improving your website performance for desktop and mobile use to improve user experience and brand perception. Poor website performance and design also lead to lower rankings on search engines, which makes the website look unreliable to the user and diminishes a website’s brand.

How to optimise website performance

An optimised website can potentially elevate your business to the next level. Fast page speed times, continuous accessibility to the website and updated features make the website more pleasant and convenient for users, encouraging them to take the desired actions. These factors all lead to higher sales, better SEO and improved brand perception. Review the following ways to optimise your website performance:

Page speed optimisation

If your web page loads fast – ideally between one and two seconds – it’s likely to rank highly on search engines, leading to a higher number of visitors and conversions. In addition, it gives a better user experience, making it more likely for users to revisit your page. Here are a few steps you can take to increase your website’s page speed:

1. Test your website’s current speed

Testing the current speed at which your site loads will show how visitors perceive your website, enabling you to discover what actions you can take to boost the speed. There are several tools available to use when testing your page speed. They include the following:

• Google PageSpeed Insights: This tool analyses several components and then gives your website a score ranging from zero to 100. These factors include first view with content (FCP), largest display with content (LCP), speed index, time to interactive, total blocked time and cumulative layout shift.
• Pingdom: Pingdom lets you visualise the components that take the longest to load on your website. This helps you identify problem areas, such as images with large sizes, so you can optimise them and improve speed.
• GTmetrix: This tool shows your webpage’s loading speed, keeps a history of the various loading times and provides recommendations based on its findings. GTmetrix also checks the size of your page and the number of requests to provide recommendations.
• Uptrends: Uptrends is an optimal choice for a first test because it offers a free speed test that gives insight into how users experience your page. Based on its analysis, Uptrends provides relevant statistics and suggestions to improve your web performance.

2. Optimise images

High-quality images often take a long time to load on a website because of their size. Consider optimising the images on your website by compressing them or reducing their size. You can change the sizes depending on the purpose of the image. For instance, a hero image (the attention-grabbing image on your site) could be 1280 x 720 pixels in dimension with an image aspect ratio of 16:9, while a blog image could have a dimension of 1200 x 630 pixels with an image aspect ratio of 3:2. Consider using tools such as TinyIMG and Compressor to optimise your website’s images.

3. Minimise the number of HTTP requests

An HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) request is a request that a client, such as a web browser, sends to a server using a URL (uniform resource locator) to access a specific resource on that server. When a user visits your website, their web browser requests to load all the items on the site from a server. Speed tests can help you identify the HTTP requests that take long.

Some ways to minimise the number of these requests include reducing image sizes and decreasing the number of JavaScript and CSS files which contain the code that created your website. Consider placing all your code in one file and removing blank spaces and lines from it. Tools such as Gulp and WordPress Super Minify can help minify lines of code, ultimately improving page speed.

4. Collaborate with a hosting agency

Collaborate with hosting providers who allocate space on their servers to store data for your website. Hypernode offers hosting solutions that can meet your needs, no matter what size your business is, to elevate your online presence. We have over 20 years of experience supplying cloud, dedicated, and cluster hosting worldwide. We provide a free hosting consultation and a 14-day free trial. Consider using our hosting services to ensure timely and reliable website operation.

Website scaling optimisation

Website scaling optimisation involves using various strategies and techniques to accommodate large volumes of data and traffic while continuously providing top performance. Explore the following ways to scale your website to improve its performance:

1. Enhance your databases

Database enhancement improves the process of storing and retrieving data, making it faster to retrieve and deliver relevant data, which improves website performance. Consider using NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB and Apache Cassandra, which store, manage and analyse large volumes of semi-structured and unstructured data in real-time. They use flexible data models to scale horizontally, allowing them to adapt to data changes without increasing latency. Optimising your databases in this way ensures that no matter how much traffic your website gets, users will continue to be able to engage with your content efficiently.

2. Embrace balance loading

Balance loading involves spreading incoming traffic across several servers to prevent overloading everything onto one server, which would cause delays. Balance loading ensures that your website can process several requests simultaneously through horizontal scaling. Consider using load balancers like Nginx and Azure Load Balancer, which use algorithms to determine the best server to redirect traffic to so it can handle the request effectively.

3. Use content delivery networks

Content delivery networks (CDNs) store copies of your websites on several servers in different geographic locations. When clients request content, for example, by searching for an item on your website, the CDN closest to the user responds to that request. This makes the process much faster because it lessens the load from your primary server, reducing latency issues. Consider CDNs like Cloudflare, CDN77 and Amazon CloudFront to optimise your website scaling.

Deployment downtime optimisation

Optimising deployment downtime is essential to ensuring that site visitors can access the content on your website even as you launch new features and other updates. It ensures business continuity and customer satisfaction, which increases revenue, conversions and customer retention. You can employ zero downtime deployment, which is the process of updating your website with no interruptions to ensure that your services remain accessible throughout the update or transition.

Achieving zero downtime deployment requires a streamlined pipeline between continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD), which automates processes such as coding, building, planning, testing, deploying, operating and monitoring software. Planning and coordinating deployments with a team requires effective communication, so ensure adequate open communication through several channels. Once deployments happen, you should monitor performance metrics, such as page speeds, to detect and rectify abnormalities quickly. It’s also essential to have rollback protocols in place so that if a rollback is necessary, your website continues to run as you attempt to fix the issue.

Here are a few strategies to use to achieve zero downtime deployment:

• Blue-Green Deployment: This strategy entails having two identical systems in place, with the blue system acting as the primary and the green system acting as the standby. The standby would be updated first, acting as an environment for testing new updates and features, after which you can update the primary system seamlessly without downtime.
• Canary Deployment: This method involves slowly introducing new updates to a small subset of servers to allow for real-time monitoring and performance improvement. Once you feel satisfied with the performance, you can update all servers or users.
• Rolling Deployment: With this strategy, you would deploy changes to only a subset of servers while maintaining the other servers’ operations so that you can make updates incrementally. This strategy allows for fast rollbacks in case of an issue and reduces the chances of prolonged downtimes.