Creating a website with strong content and an appealing design is only half the battle. The other half is website performance. The performance of a website is the ease with which pages load and the speed with which users interact with different elements of the website.
Website performance is closely connected with the business goals of a website. These goals include the ability to attract visitors, engage them with valuable content, and ultimately turn them into customers.
Developers should have a strong understanding of performance because it closely integrates with design and UX and has an impact on the overall ranking of a website on search engine result pages (SEO).
What Determines Website Performance?
There are several factors that determine website performance. Some of the factors include design and architectural decisions made on a website. These factors can further be broken down into development decisions.
Some of the decisions are:
- The type and quality of the server
- The size of video and other media files
- Whether and how JavaScript is executed
- The size and arrangement of CSS files
- The type and quality of scripts integrated into the website
- Whether and how the website is cached
- The type and quality of hosting and mobile optimization
- Whether and how a content delivery network (CDN) is integrated
Websites should not remove all features in an effort to increase performance. Website developers should focus on optimizing features of the website that aren't essential and that cause delays.
Importance of Performance to Users
Web users expect pages to load in a reasonable time. If a page takes too long to load, users will abandon it. This becomes particularly true for mobile users, where network and device capabilities and conditions vary.
A well-designed website facilitates users to perform everyday activities such as:
- Navigation
- Information consumption
- Information gathering
- Transaction completion
Performance is part of the user experience.
The Relationship of Performance and SEO
While there is a close relationship between performance and page experience in the context of SEO, the major influencers of SEO are content, site structure, accessibility, and relevance, among others.
Therefore, if a site’s performance is poor, it can affect users as well as search engine visibility.
An effective SEO strategy encompasses numerous factors, including the incorporation of performance as one of them.
How to Enhance Performance
1. Use Appropriately Sized Images
Large images consume a lot of data. Images can be tuned to better formats, sizes, and then compressed to minimize the data they consume.
Developers should also ensure images are sized appropriately to the requirements.
2. Minimize Unused JavaScript
JavaScript can make a website interactive and interesting, but poor optimizations and the use of large or numerous scripts can slow down processing time of a page.
3. Caching
When a resource is frequently requested, it can be stored for a period of time. On subsequent requests, it can be loaded from the cache to reduce the processing time.
Caching helps reduce the load on the servers, and improves response time for frequent users.
4. Consider a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) involves placing a copy of your website's resources (files) on multiple servers, possibly in different countries.
This has the potential to geographically place your servers closer to your users, which improves the time it takes to load your website's contents for users in that region.
5. Review Third-Party Resources
Third-party scripts are commonly used to add advertisements, analytics, chats, media, and many other things to a web page.
These can add many additional requests to a page. Every once in awhile scripts should be evaluated to see if they are still needed. If a script is no longer useful, it can be removed to improve a web page's performance.
Mobile Performance Should Not Be Ignored
A website may perform well on a desktop computer, but may not be usable on a smartphone.
An often overlooked consideration is performance when developing and designing a website to be used by many types of users.
3. Performance Should Be A Priority During Development
A website's performance can be baked into a website from the beginning of the development process. Performance should always be part of a website's considerations.
For example, developers can:
- Select lighter weight technologies as appropriate
- Optimize assets
- Minimize dependencies
- Use appropriate loading techniques
- Assess performance post-release
- Regularly test important pages
Integrating performance improvements in the development process helps prevent the buildup of technical debt.
Performance and Digital Marketing
A significant amount of time, effort, and money may be invested to achieve good visibility through various channels such as search, social, ads, etc.
However, attracting traffic is only half the battle.
If visitors come to a landing page that has a slow loading time or a complicated navigation that makes it difficult to get to the endpoint, then a significant part of the marketing effort may be wasted.
For this reason, the area of digital marketing and performance are connected. The website is often the marketing 'funnel' where traffic is converted to a lead, sale, booking, inquiry, etc.
Don't Optimize for Speed Alone
A trade-off exists.
A site should load quickly, but it should also be useful and easy to use. Merely stripping away interactive elements to improve a site’s performance score is not necessarily improving the site or the product.
The goal should be to strike a balance between:
- Performance
- Functionality
- Accessibility
- Usability
- Visual design
- Business requirements
The goal should be to remove as much unnecessary code as possible. This leaves more bandwidth for improving website performance.
Conclusion
Website performance is the responsibility of development, design, SEO, and digital marketing.
A faster and more responsive site improves the user experience and fulfill performance and marketing objectives.
Addressing performance issues should be part of routine website maintenance.
Top comments (0)