You Are Doing It Wrong – Optimise Your Website Speed or Risk Losing Clients

You’ve set up your website with the right web designing, content and SEO techniques which slowly builds an audience for your blog with a steady flow of regular visitors. After some time, you notice that despite doing everything right, things are dropping.

You have fewer repeat visitors, only a few new subscriptions, and no one seems to buy your products and services. When you wonder what went wrong while everything looks okay, the only possible reason could be a poor web performance.

Yes, a drop in your website speed is indeed one of the most common reasons for losing clients. Website speed affects many things in your website like bounce rate, reader satisfaction, page views and even revenue!

All it takes is a drop in a fraction-of-a-second in your website speed to lose customers! You thus definitely need to optimise and increase the speed of your website as faster speed means higher rankings and more traffic, conversions and business.

If you need help, here are the few things which have to be done to improve your website speed.

1. Combine common code

Start by thinking modular. Combine as many common code pieces as possible to use less code with the same result. Modularity doesn’t matter much if your site runs only on basic HTML and CSS. It does affect the more complex JavaScript, especially on mobile as too much bloat hurts.

2. Reduce dependency requests and HTML

The page downloading speed is also greatly reduced by dependency requests that makes the parsing and downloading process difficult. Even calling images from the stylesheet reduces its’ speed. So, limit these and use alternative optimisation methods like SVG or sprites wherever applicable.

If your website is big and needs at least a few dozen requests, get a CDN to distribute your content, as it doesn’t reduce file sizes and load time as much as it removes extra HTTP requests. At the most, it may remove slow server connections from the equation.

3. Write smart code

At times, your written code slows your website speed. Even poor CSS and bloated JavaScript can reduce your loading time. In fact, JavaScript is worse than poorly written CSS, and is often overlooked. So if possible, call JavaScript last so that the browser first parses through head files HTTP requests and CSS to show the mark-up well before JavaScript slows things down.

4. Different production and development environment code bases

A marked difference between the development and production environment code bases indicates a reduction of file sizes across the board. Image and data compression results in the largest difference between the two wherein the production environment ends up as lean and fast as possible.

Built-in tools like Photoshop’s ‘Save for web’ compression is great for compressing images while the language used decides code impression. In case of plain HTML and CSS, services like Google’s HTML Compressor and YUI Compressor prove useful.

5. Simple HTML

Aim for efficient and simple HTML to minimise bloat and write leaner CSS selectors. CSS resets enforce resettling styling on all common elements. So even if you don’t target an extra div, its padding and minimal margin reset can slow things down. While one or two div don’t matter much, things can get out of hand when you have dozens of them and more elements in the HTML5 spec.

6. Google promotes cleaner code

Google promotes and supports cleaner code. Google also pays critical attention to how different attributes are rendered where too many external resources, poorly written JavaScript and too large images can pull a site’s ranking down. This is with good intention as their requirements for a good search engine ranking revolves around good development practices.

Verdict

So you not only need to optimise code thinking about file sizes, but also consider how it will be read by browsers or humans. Mobile use also has to be considered with so many services enforcing constraining data caps these days. Though this may take time, it’s worth it.

It improves browser and mobile performance and can also get your content a higher ranking on search engines. Moreover, reduced file sizes through optimised code reduces your bandwidth costs as hosts and bandwidth usage on the user level too! So the next time you launch your website, use a compression engine to shave off as many megabytes from your images and data as possible to prevent losing customers!