Website Optimisation
Website optimisation should be a high priority
Is Your Website Slow?
If your site takes a few extra seconds to load, it can impact your ability to engage visitors.
To be more technical, if your site takes more than three seconds to load, you can lose almost half of your visitors.
For the visitors that decide to stick around, your slow loading website can deter them from returning.
Putting in the effort to increase your site speed, even by one second, could have a major impact on enquiries or sales.
Website optimisation and performance should be a priority, especially when there is so much online competition.
The affects of a poorly set up or slow website can really impact your business.
Why Optimise Your Website?
User experience has long been a significant factor in determining search engine rankings, influencing how websites are positioned in search results.
Prior to this pivotal shift in indexing practices, search results primarily took into consideration the desktop experience, often neglecting the mobile user experience.
As a result, even when a site provided a subpar or poor mobile experience, it still had a viable chance at ranking on page one of search results, potentially misleading users who accessed the site via mobile devices.
However, the landscape has changed dramatically, and pages are now indexed and ranked based on the mobile user experience, ensuring that sites optimized for mobile users are prioritized in search rankings.
What is a good page load time?
Google recommends a load time of three seconds.
In a test of 126 countries, Google found that 70% of pages took nearly seven seconds to show content above the fold.
This shows that most site owners need to improve their site speed to meet Google’s standards.
How Do I Optimise My Website?
Website Optimisation Starts With The Server.
A host server provides services to serve your website to the world.
There is little point trying to save a few dollars using a low or average quality server that’s overseas, if it slows things down, even a little.
It’s important to consider using a quality Australian host server when visitors are local or Australian, as it will speed up delivery.
Australian hosting is not expensive when you realise what it does for your business.
Image Optimisation
Large images significantly slow down web pages, leading to a less than optimal user experience and increased bounce rates.
Nearly half of all website optimisation problems are caused by improperly managed images, which can drastically affect loading times and overall site performance.
Without a doubt, images are the primary cause of slow-loading websites, which can frustrate users and reduce engagement.
Images can be optimised automatically using a specialised program or manually optimised using an application like Adobe Photoshop, which allows for precise control over image quality and file size.
Consider changing the image type that your website serves to more efficient formats.
Support the serving of WebP format instead of traditional JPEG or PNG images where possible, as WebP offers superior compression and quality, leading to faster load times and a better user experience.
Reduce HTTP requests
Not all code is created equal, and this becomes particularly evident when considering the performance of your website.
When your browser fetches your website, it uses HTTP, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
This protocol facilitates a data request-response interaction between the client, which is your browser, and the host, which is the server where your website is stored.
The more HTTP requests your site makes, the slower it will load, as each request adds to the overall load time.
Optimizing your code is crucial for performance. This involves minimizing the number of HTTP requests by combining files, reducing file sizes, and leveraging techniques like caching and compression.
By doing so, you can significantly enhance the speed and efficiency of your website, providing a better user experience and potentially improving your search engine rankings.
Minify CSS and JavaScript
Extra time and weight from additional JavaScript and CSS files can significantly impact the performance of your website.
These files, when not optimized, can lead to longer load times, which in turn can frustrate users and potentially drive them away.
Moreover, the increased weight of these files can consume more bandwidth, which is particularly problematic for users with limited data plans or slower internet connections.
Minification of resources means removing unnecessary characters from your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that are not required for the code to function. This process includes eliminating spaces, comments, and other redundant elements that do not affect the execution of the code.
By doing so, you can significantly reduce the file size, which will speed up your load times as it reduces the amount of code that is requested from the server.
Faster load times enhance the user experience, improve SEO rankings, and can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Use a CDN (content delivery network)
A content delivery network (CDN) can significantly enhance the speed of your website by distributing your content across multiple servers located in various geographic regions.
‘By leveraging a CDN, you can optimize the delivery of your files, including images, JavaScript, and CSS, ensuring a faster and more efficient user experience.
This optimization is achieved by caching your content closer to the end-users, reducing latency and load times.
Additionally, a CDN can handle high traffic volumes and mitigate the risk of server overload, providing a more reliable and scalable solution for your website’s performance needs.
Increase the Performance of your Website
Get started on website optimisation.
We will test your website to see what might be causing bottlenecks and to see where the delay or load is.
Contact us for a report on your website and what we can do for you.