Top 7 Tips To Increase Your Website Performance

The days are gone, when you have to wait minutes for a website to load. Now that most of us have access to high-speed internet connections everywhere, there’s little justification for poor website performance.

If you have a WordPress website, you'll have to keep an eye on how long it takes for it to load. Optimizing your website, especially the loading time not only improves the user experience but can also increase your conversions and prevent your visitors from moving to your competitor’s website. 

There are tons of methods to improve your website performance, and in this article, we’ll go through the top 7 effective tips which will help you to improve your website performance.  

So, without any further ado, let’s get started. 

What is Website Performance? 

Website Performance is the objective measurement and perceived user experience of a website or application. 

In simple terms, Website Performance is all about making your websites fast. Checking whether the site loads quickly, or allows the user to interact with it quickly, provides reassuring feedback if something takes a long time to load and whether the scrolling and animations are working smoothly or not. 

Now that you know the meaning of Website Performance, let’s take a look at the reasons why you should improve your website performance. 

Why Should You Improve Your Website Performance? 

Many website owners make the mistake of assuming that their sites are fast enough without even checking their actual performance. Most websites nowadays load relatively quickly if the end-user has a good internet connection. 

However, your idea of “fast” and that of your visitors may be quite different. 

According to research, most users have a surprising lack of patience when it comes to extended loading times. Nearly 47% of visitors expect all websites to load in a few seconds or less. 

For most websites, three seconds is the ideal page load time. And the conversions might drop by 7% for every additional second it takes for a page to load. So, you have to try to reduce the loading time of your website by up to three seconds. 

And if you’re unsure about the speed of your website, then now is the time to find out. Many factors can influence your website performance, and for conducting speed tests a variety of tools are available.  

Also, keep in mind that just because your results are under three seconds doesn't mean there isn't potential for improvement in terms of web performance. As your site grows in popularity, optimising loading speeds becomes even more important, and shaving off a few milliseconds today might make a major impact afterwards. 

But to optimize your website you must have adequate knowledge regarding the website, and by learning website planning you can do all those things easily. 

You can surf through certain videos on YouTube or learn by joining a WordPress Course.

Top 7 Tips To Improve Your Website Performance 

1. Choose the Right Hosting Provider  

Choosing the right hosting provider is the most important thing which you have to do. Ideally, you’d use a web host that provides top-notch performance across the board. Every web hosting service has a different out-of-the-box performance, and each one will claim to be the quickest, so it’s your job to evaluate the features and rates, as well as read as many reviews as you can before making a decision. 

You can always switch web hosting companies later, but this is inconvenient. And if you choose the proper service and hosting plan then your WordPress website should be lightning fast right from the start. 

So, choose the proper and the best web hosting provider. 

2. Optimize Your Website Images 

Images improve everything, and they're an essential component of modern web design. The importance of image is to connect your customers to your products or services. 

But if you use a high-resolution image file, which is quite large, then it will result in longer loading times, and your visitors might exit your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. And that will result in increasing your bounce rate which will further affect your conversions.  

There are two basic approaches to resolve this problem - 

1. Compress your images before uploading them to your website. 
2. Resize your images to adjust to the modern screen resolution.

There are numerous programmes available for compressing photos with minimum or no quality loss. And if you're using WordPress, you can use plugins to automate the process.

So, do optimise your website images properly before uploading them on your website. 

3. Choose a Well Optimized WordPress Theme 

Beyond just changing the look of your website, WordPress themes can have a huge impact. Many themes nowadays come with dozens of unique features, custom page builders, and a lot more. 

Even if you do everything correctly, not all WordPress themes are adequately optimised, which can result in slow loading times. Because it's impossible to test hundreds of themes on your own servers, we recommend doing a lot of research before deciding on a template.

There are hundreds of articles about the quickest WordPress themes on the internet, and it's also a good idea to read independent reviews. Just like with your web host, conducting your research before making a decision can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.

So, we recommend you do sufficient research and choose a well-optimized WordPress theme.

4. Enable Leverage Browser Caching

Caching is one of the most important measures in reducing the time it takes for your website to load. 

Browser caching instructs your visitors' browsers to temporarily store some or all of your website's static files on their system. Because those visitors won't have to refresh your site completely every time they come back, subsequent visits should be substantially faster. 

There are a variety of ways to use browser caching in WordPress, and if you haven't done it already, now is the time to do so. 

5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Your website is hosted on a single server with a specific location in most types of hosting, except cloud hosting. To load your website, each visitor must connect to that server, which can cause bottlenecks.

CDNs are global clusters of servers that store copies of websites. They make use of servers that are spread around the globe. This indicates that the files will be served by the server nearest to your visitor. 

This setup gives you two advantages - 

1. It decreases the amount of work your servers have to do.
2. For overseas or international visitors, it translates to lower loading times. 

There are numerous excellent CDN options for WordPress. But they are not free, you have to pay some sort of amount for it. And spending a little money on a CDN can have a substantial impact on the loading times of a website.

6. Enable GZIP Compression  

GZIP is a compression technology that allows you to minimise the file sizes of several parts on your website. Simply using GZIP compression can lower the size of your pages by up to 70% in some circumstances.

In general, the smaller a page is, the faster it will load. Many web providers enable GZIP compression by default for almost all plans.

So, if you don’t use GZIP compression then we suggest you start using it and make your website performance better. 

7. Clean-up Unused WordPress Plugins

It's exciting and good to try out new plugins, but it's critical not to keep the ones you're not using. Plugins, add extra code and functionality to your website, which might slow it down. You're slowing down the user experience for no reason if you're not using those features.

Most plugins should not have a significant impact on loading times. It merely takes a few seconds to turn off the plugins you're not using.

So, we recommend that you go through your plugins page every couple of months and turn off any that you aren't using. After a while, if you don't miss them, you can uninstall them. 

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Conclusion 

Improving a website's performance can be a challenging task, especially with the wide range of devices, connectivity, browsers, and operating systems, but if your business relies on your website as one of the primary channels for reaching your customers, it will have a positive impact. 

But only optimising your website is not enough, your goal should also be to rank your website on the top of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Thus, an online SEO course can be of great help for you to get started!

We hope these effective tips have helped you gain some valuable insights and make some much-needed changes to your website. Leave us your feedback in the comments section below. 

Author’s Bio

Karan Shah

Founder and CEO at IIDE

An ‘Edupreneur’ and the founder of IIDE – Indian Institute of Digital Education.

He is a passionate public speaker and teacher for over 10 years. He has trained over 1,00,000+ students and 25+ corporates in Digital Marketing via online and offline channels. He is a Harvard alumnus specializing in E-commerce. He is a TEDx speaker and is a visiting faculty at India’s top management institutes like the IIMs.