6 Hacks to Help Improve Your Website’s Performance

Keeping your website’s performance in top condition isn’t just important out of necessity. Because Google is dedicated to providing favorable user experience, it constantly tweaks its algorithm to favor well-performing websites.

This means that websites that are slow and badly-designed are expected to have lesser traffic referrals from Google search results, which will ultimately affect your brand and business.

Making sure that your website performs well is crucial in order for it to rank well on Google search results. However, making it happen can sometimes feel very challenging to achieve.

With these six hacks, you’ll be able to increase your website’s load speed and improve your website performance.

Diagnose Your Website

Does it take your website forever before it completely loads all the elements on your homepage? Just think of the effect this slow load speed can have on your website visitors.

Most users, if not all, are expecting a website to load in 5 seconds or less. If your website takes more time to load up, then something’s definitely wrong.

In order for you to properly address the problems on your website, knowing the issues is the first step.

Perform a website speed test diagnosis in order for you to identify what aspects need to be addressed. There are a couple of tools you can use online, such as:

• Pingdom
• Uptrends
• GTMetrix

These tools can provide you with the exact time it takes an average person to load your website. These can also list down some of the major concerns that you should improve on your website. However, you might have to pay to get a complete and thorough list of diagnostic for your website. Nonetheless, this will be very crucial in improving your website performance.

Optimize Your Images

This tip isn’t going to talk about the basic image optimization tips wherein you just tag your images properly and upload with a low file size – these should already be common practice.

Web browsers can load files from multiple domains at the same time. This means you can have your images hosted on multiple images hosting websites, even if you outsource web design in the Philippines.

Instead of putting all your website’s files on one domain, spreading it out among multiple hosting sites can yield faster loading speeds.

If you come across website hosting providers that offer a post-upload resizing feature, you might want to pass on it. This actually doesn’t do anything with regards to website loading speed.

Just stick to resizing your images before having them uploaded on your website hosting platform to ensure consistency and speed.

Clean Up Your HTML Code

Your website’s HTML, or hypertext markup language, is the foundation of your website. It allows you to format your webpages and use headings, subheadings, create lists, and other essential text formatting options.

Because HTML codes can be processed by web crawlers in an instant, keeping your HTML code clean and up-to-date will be an advantage.

Make sure your HTML code is precisely written without any errors to keep it effective for your website.

Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files

Minification is the process of compressing codes and scripts so they are more compact. It helps you remove characters that are not really essential for your website to function.

Because most codes and scripts use indentations and notes to keep it easily readable for humans, “minifying” these will easily remove these elements, even if it just adds up to a few bytes. After all, these might still add up to milliseconds in terms of website loading speed.

Use Prefetching

Users normally spend a few minutes between landing on a page and clicking on a new link to go to another. The time in between these actions gives your website a chance to prepare and anticipate the next move of your user.

Prefetching helps create a pleasing browsing experience by fetching some resources and other related items ahead of time. It can be applied in three main types:

• Link prefetching
• DNS prefetching
• Prerendering

With prefetching, a website’s URL, CSS, images, and JavaScript are already sent out before a visitor even leaves the webpage they are currently browsing. This minimizes the loading times when browsing in between these pages.

Localize Your Hosting

For you to have a fast website, you’ll need to have a hosting provider that ensures security, scalability, as well as an infrastructure that’s reliable and adaptive.

With this, you need to be wary of your hosting’s pricing. Normally, cheap hosting options will have you share your server with other unrelated websites. If you’re just starting up, this might be ideal. But if you’re planning to expand aggressively, this might turn out to be a roadblock.

If this is within your budget, ensure that your website is using an exclusive server that hosts files only for your website, especially if you expect high amounts of traffic. This will enable you to max out on speeds and provide you with a larger room to grow down the road.

Hacking the Web With Your Website’s Performance

Making sure that your website is performing well requires a lot of skill and attention. Just keep on working to provide a pleasing user experience and your website will someday hit the coveted top spot on Google search results.

At the end of the day, once everything kicks in, all of your hard work will be worth it once you reach the top.