The impact of website performance
Website performance is something that doesn’t always get the important treatment it deserves. Have you ever sat and waited for a website to load? And waited. And waited.
We all understand the frustration of waiting for a website to load, and many of us react the same way – by closing the tab.
The most common reason for people to leave websites, aside from content that is not what the visitor was looking for, or an outdated design, is website performance. Studies show that the optimal maximum loading time for a website, under ideal conditions, is two seconds. Anything over three seconds, and over 40% of users will leave your website.
Since we live in an age of high speed internet and the ability to find anything on the web almost instantly, visitors have an expectation that websites will load up quickly.
Making sure your website performs optimally helps with providing a good user experience, and can even positively influence sales and other conversions on a website. According to HubSpot, B2B websites that load in one second have on average 3x more conversions than B2B websites that load in 5 seconds.
Let’s take a look at what impacts website performance.
What causes poor website performance?
There’s a variety of factors that can influence a website to load slowly, and often times it’s a snowball effect.
Poorly written code: This is usually the number one contributor to slow loading websites from what we’ve seen. Usually, some improvements in code can make a huge difference. However, we’re not always in control of the code on our websites. This is especially true in the case of WordPress websites. Easy access to the WordPress ecosystem means that developers aren’t always kept in check for the code quality in their plugins or themes. Always be sure to use plugins and themes from reputable vendors.
Large images or external media: Making sure that the images on your website are optimised for use on normally used devices is really important. There’s no sense in having an image on your website with an overly high resolution – this makes image load time longer and can cause your website to seemingly “jump around” as elements load in. Ensure that images are optimised for various devices, striking a balance between quality and performance.
Subpar hosting: If everything on your website is well-optimised, but you’re still finding slow loading times on different internet connections, odds are that your hosting provider has some work to do. Servers that aren’t set up well or maintained at a high standard could very well cause your website to load slowly. Make sure your hosting provider has a good reputation for performance. The cheaper alternative can often cost you precious seconds when loading your website.
Outdated plugins: In the case of CMS-driven websites (WordPress, Joomla, etc.), it’s very important to make sure that plugins and themes are kept up to date. Updates to plugins usually include new features, performance enhancements or security-related updates. Using outdated plugins on a WordPress website makes you a target for hackers as well as being a common cause for suboptimal performance. Always keep plugins and themes up to date. Without this, the security and performance of your website are both at risk.
Ineffective caching: Caching refers to the ability to store website content on a faster server or on a visitor’s browser for some predefined period of time. Effective caching allows for your website to load almost instantaneously. This can be a rather technical feature to set up, so it’s best to let your developer take care of it. Making use of content distribution networks can often help to speed up the load time of assets on your website, like images or special scripts. Make sure your hosting setup supports a good caching strategy and that your website is set up to make use of caching.
How can I check on my website’s performance?
Checking your website’s performance score is easy with diagnostic tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Just enter your website’s URL (domain name) and click the Analyze button. After a minute or two, you’ll get some results. These can often be technical to interpret, so consult your developer if you have any concerns around the scores you’re seeing. You should always aim to see above 90% for each of the following categories: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO.
The performance can be simple to read for some items, such as “properly size images”. For others, it might not be so human-friendly, like “serve static assets with an efficient cache policy”. In almost all cases, your developer will be the one to fix the issue.
So, what’s the fix?
If you’re having issues with your website’s performance, we’re always here to help. Depending on the technology that your website is built with, there are different approaches we could take to solve the problem. The first step is diagnostics, to figure out why your website is performing sub-optimally.
We’ll then provide you with a full website audit for all aspects of your website, including but not limited to performance, as well as the steps that need to be taken to remedy the issue.
Get in touch with us today to perform a website audit for you!