Web performance and download speeds are increasing science, and research shows that milliseconds can make a real difference in customer behavior and get those conversions of sales. Most website owners automatically assume that to get the most customers they need all the "bells and whistles" on their site. But those extra features like parallax web scrolling and trendy moving background are only fine as long as customers don't have to wait for the website to load for 10 seconds.
The main point to keep in mind is that some sacrifices come with a quick website. You'll have to decide very quickly what's the core of your user experience, and then get rid of all the "extras" that don't boost that primary experience. To provide your customers with the best, fastest, and most efficient user experience, we recommend 8 key website enhancement strategies. Read on, please!
Given the mobile website's prominence (and dominance!), making sure your website is mobile first is critical. It is now necessary to switch the paradigm of making desktop sites responsive to mobile devices. The strategy should be to first code for mobile users and then gradually improve the tablet and desktop experience. This will help to decrease the number of unnecessary dependencies. So, how do you first make your website mobile? Google's Mobile Website Auditor is the easiest way to check the usability of your website on the mobile. The test shows the score of your website by selecting usability criteria, such as configuration of viewpoints, plugins, proximity of clickable elements and readability of text. Optimize your User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) for mobile devices Think of your user flow strategy, SEO optimization, voice search and copy readability for all devices UI.
61 percent of the page weight of a website on a desktop computer is images, according to the HTTP Archive. Make sure your pictures are properly sized. Adopting new image formats like WebP and JPeg XR can also help to reduce image weight by 20 to 50% without sacrificing quality. Best ways to reduce image size for responsive design Reduce the actual image size in any editor Combine images into CSS sprites to reduce roundtrips This is a very useful technique that combines commonly used images into a single image file, reducing the number of HTTP requests required to download the web page. This feature is implemented by properly using the properties of the CSS background image and background position. Set a container property with a maximum width not to exceed 90 percent of the boundary .
width.container{
width: 800px;
maximum width: 90 percent;
}Autoresize images to the maximum width using max width:100 percent and height: auto img{ max width: 100 percent; height: auto;
A content delivery network is a system that uses distributed servers to deliver websites and other web content depending on the location of the user and the content of the website. Essentially, a way to take static files such as CSS, images, and JavaScript from a website and deliver them through web servers closer to the physical location of the user. Shorter proximity makes loading time faster. If you host your website with Forte Web Design, ask us how we can implement CDN to further improve site speed delivery.
What, then, is Web Caching? Caching is a temporary web pages storage mechanism for reducing bandwidth and improving performance. The cached version will be served when a visitor arrives at your site unless it has changed since the last cache. This saves time for the server and makes things much faster. Make sure your website has this feature enabled! And if you need help understanding this then contact us here at Forte Web Design where we can explain the different types of caching, what they do and why they are important.
What is a request for HTTP? HTTP is a web browser request / response protocol used to fetch web server files. Here you can read more about using GET or POST methods.
Another trick is to think about loading asynchronously any of your JavaScripts from third parties. Today websites are increasingly integrated with content from third parties: social media, chat features, comment services, feeds for information, and others. So if you load async then the third party crashes in the event that your page does not stop trying to load that resource. Loading Async can also accelerate page loads.
Check with your hosting provider to see if you have shared or dedicated hosting if you have gone through the checklist above and still find that web performance is affected. A shared hosting account often involves sharing server space with dozens of other companies where speed of the website is affected by the number of people using the servers. If this is the case, it may be time to consider a dedicated plan where you can access the server on your own.
There are advantages to offloading your web monitoring to a cloud based hosting solution. Cost, scalability, efficiency, to name a few. Not to mention, this allows you to focus on growing your business, which is of the greatest importance anyway. If you want to get onboard with the latest cloud-based monitoring, try a 24/7 monitoring service such as Uptime Robot. Uptime Robot allows organizations to monitor their network at any time and from anywhere with its world-class first-class service. For instance, you can tell Uptime Robot when your hosting service goes down, accompanied by timely notifications via texts and email. Forte Web Design can help with the configuration of this service.
Remember, your website's primary focus is on improving traffic and making money. The glossy images and trendy styles may look good and good, but they may be detrimental if your visitors wait more than 10 seconds to access your site. Go through the above 8 points to make sure all is optimized and run as efficiently as possible. With a lot of happy returns, your customers will thank you!
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