Google research says that more than 3 seconds of website loading is enough time for users to decide to leave the website and look for alternatives.
An additional second, even if it seems unnoticeable, will gather attention from users and will make them literally annoyed by a slowly loading website.
And various advertising or promotional services will consider such a loading time as inappropriate, therefore lowering a website’s rank.
So, basically, a slow loading speed of a website will affect all of its aspects. From users’ perception of a business represented by a website and up to its position in various search, advertising, and promotional services.
Therefore, a website will bring results worse than it should, as well as clients outflow followed by reputational and financial losses.
All of the aforementioned means that you literally need to maintain your website’s performance. Or your site will lack in all aspects and bring no profits at all.
In every possible way. In other words, a properly working website is a must if you want your company to prosper and have a vast audience. Hence, it must be accessible all the time, load as fast as possible, and be a well-managed system as a whole.
Website Performance In A Nutshell
In simple words, website performance itself is literally a measurement of how fast its pages are loading in users’ browsers and how they are displaying for them. And its optimization is a must. Moreover, this is a task of the same importance for a webmaster as maintaining the highest possible uptime.
High performance of the website can be achieved by various means. But first things first – every website owner or webmaster should set up a proper monitoring routine.
For example, it will be the best decision to use host-tracker page speed monitoring for checking the website’s loading speed. It will surely be helpful in finding various bottlenecks in the loading process itself. From server response timing and up to content loading time.
Considering all mentioned above, great website performance will lead to two things. First and foremost, it will lead to higher visitors conversion and lower users bounce rates. And the former will eventually lead to more potential clients and with them, to higher profits. All this is called user satisfaction. And it really matters when we are talking about business.
The other thing the high performance of a website will lead to is the aforementioned high approval from advertising systems, promotional services, and search engines. Basically, the faster the website loading speed is, the higher it will be. And this will be followed by higher queue ratings.
Website Performance Is The Fuel For Good User Experience
If you want to improve the experience that users will have when they are visiting your website, you need to improve its performance at all costs. From a quickly responding server and neatly working user interfaces to web page loading speed.
And when server response can be easily checked if you use monitor ping host tracker service, other metrics are not so easy to understand at an instant. From a website owner’s perspective, these metrics include, but are not limited to:
- Overall user experience (including mobile experience) from a website.
- Visitor retention on a website.
- Conversions and sales.
- Brand perception from visitors and possible business partners.
First things first. If users visit a neat and quick-loading website, they are bound to stay, or at least visit again, if they need something from the services or products this website offers.
And this is what is called a positive user experience. This is what you should be targeting your website for sure. This way users will look at your brand with a positive perception.
On the other hand, if users visit a messy and slowly loading website, they surely will have a hard time staying on it for a long. It will be, without a doubt, the worst possible experience for users. And they will leave as soon as possible, so the website will have no conversions.
So, if a website is lacking, users will not have a positive experience visiting it. This will surely lower conversions and sales metrics.
If we are talking about numbers needed for a positive user experience, we should mention website loading time. Three seconds at max – that’s the statement from Google researchers, as it was already mentioned, And the lower, the better, literally. And this is an exaggeration, suitable for heavy websites.
Actually, lightweight websites can load in less than a second. But that’s not a thing to worry about, because such websites usually have far less content than most companies would need on a landing page. Therefore, a loading time of fewer than two seconds is actually fine.
And it is important not to forget about mobile version users. Mobile-first is a thing to keep in mind because usually, a mobile website version loads literally twice as slowly as a desktop version. So, a mobile website must be at least 50% lighter than its full-fledged desktop counterpart.
Best Tools To Check Website Performance
To guide a performance optimization for your website it is vital to measure how quickly it is currently loading. The best instant method to do this is to run a couple of speed tests for web pages.
Of course, it is best to use online-based services to deal with it. Because you can at least gather some statistics on it and find out which parts of your website are good and which parts are lacking. Therefore, you will find the biggest flaws and get rid of them.
But the best thing to measure and maintain a website’s performance on a regular basis is to conduct its full-scale monitoring. And the best way to do it is to opt in for a good and versatile website monitoring service.
HostTracker, for example, is one of the top-notch options to deal with website monitoring. It has a variety of tools to check every aspect of a website and will be helpful in overall monitoring. You can easily check site uptime 24/7 on host tracker as well as test website’s loading timings, content integrity, and loading speed, and so on.
Therefore, with the help of such a service, you will be able to find what, when, and where is slowing your website’s performance down. Moreover, this system will send you a notification message about where to look for the source of troubles if there are any.
And you (or your webmaster) will be able to fix everything in the fastest way possible. Without the need to manually look through logs and reports from various independent services or tools.
What Usually Slows Down Website Performance
Website performance, as it was mentioned earlier, depends on a variety of metrics. In a nutshell, you must keep in mind that server response time and landing page loading speed are not the only ones affecting overall loading speed.
From most users’ perspectives, every website is a single entity though. But it doesn’t matter if you as its owner understand your website’s complexity. So, basically, even if you have a properly set up monitoring system, you must understand what to fix in case of troubles with your website’s performance.
Hosting Reliability and Location
If web hosting is reliable, a service plan is well-fitting for your needs and the service provider has a properly set up bandwidth for your website, then everything should be fine.
But if there are troubles with a server, your website could load way slower than expected. Especially when you are using shared hosting for your website. But that’s not all.
From users’ perspective, your website should load within those aforementioned 3 seconds no matter where your website’s server is. Basically, if your hosting provider has a server in New York, users from Paris will have a little bit of a hard time loading your website quickly.
And that’s where you will need a good CDN (Content-Delivery Network) to shorten the distance virtually. With this, you will be able to achieve the shortest website loading time possible no matter the users’ locations.
Web Page Size
That is the thing everyone is talking about when they mention heavyweight or lightweight websites. Web page size refers to the sum of all of its resources from internal code and embedded services to various types of content and databases.
And, obviously, the higher the weight, the longer it will take to load a website. Usually, it is vital to have all frontend page code and all content optimized for quick and neat loading. With balancing between lightweights and quality in mind.
Content Compression
Compression is an integral procedure that must be done to drastically shorten loading time by decreasing the size of every single file on the website before it will reach users’ devices. The most common compression method nowadays is GZIP, so you should become familiar with it.
Basically, with GZIP compression set up on the server, a server will compress files using lossless methods and users’ browsers will subsequently decompress them to their original size. This way the size of the web page becomes smaller due to the fact that the content becomes less heavyweight.
Web Browser Caching
In addition to compression, it is important to properly set up web browser caching. It will be helpful if your website has a lot of identical content on different web pages. Because if this content will be cacheable, users’ web browsers will be saving it locally, therefore improving the web page’s overall loading speed.
Simply put, browsers will request cached data from a user’s local storage instead of a server. And it will save time required for web page loading as well as users’ bandwidth.
Caching is a good thing when you have a lot of static content which will remain unchanged for a long time. But if you have any frequently changing content, you should not mark it as cacheable.
Because otherwise, users’ browsers will get the same data on a web page even if it was updated. And, of course, it is important not to forget about caching time limits to set everything up properly.
CSS and JavaScript
Those two things, CSS and JS, are sometimes literally a pain below your back if you set up the loading order wrong. Because if CSS or JS web page code is present on a web page, it will load before everything else.
Even if it is really unneeded for the top of the page. It is easily fixable by removing those web page code parts. And if you can’t remove them, you can fix those issues by using various plugins.
Or by adding script attributes like defer (to load CSS or JS after everything else) or async (to load in parallel with everything else). It will not give a huge loading boost, but it will be noticeable.
