With websites becoming increasingly intuitive and interactive, keeping your website optimized for performance gets increasingly more challenging by the day. As a business owner, web developer, media manager, or somewhere in between, you’ll want to make sure your website is as user-friendly as possible, loading as fast as possible.
Reducing load times, plugins, and the number of HTTP requests can make all the difference when it comes to website quality. Here’s what you should do to keep your website optimized for performance.
Compress Your Images
Adding images to your website, especially with accompanying alt text, is a great way to bolster your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking. However, haphazardly throwing such images onto your website won’t leave it optimized for performance, especially if the file size is too large.
One great way to circumvent slow, laggy load times is to compress your images. According to SearchEngineJournal, putting an image online without compression is like adding a “giant bowling ball weight” to your website. Uncompressed images, in turn, slow your website’s load times down. This, however, is an easy fix. You can upload your images to a site like TinyPNG or Compress JPEG, or even use Photoshop to compress your images.
You’ll also want to be mindful of the image type you’re using. PNG, JPEG, and WebP images are common. According to WPMU DEV, PNG files boast a lossless compression algorithm, meaning that you can compress your images without losing quality. JPEGs, on the other hand, are good for photography, but not so much for pictures with high contrast. And lastly, WebP, which arrived in 2010, are 26% smaller than PNGs and 25-34% smaller than JPEGs. They, however, were not supported by Apple’s Safari browser until 2020.
Optimize Your Database
For those who use a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, there are probably a lot of useless plugins and cluttered data that are throttling your website’s speed. Items like spam, comments, trash, and post revisions are known to slow down your website. Getting rid of them can leave your website optimized for performance.
This can be circumvented by clearing your website’s cache through the database. On WordPress, clearing the cache eliminates your site’s temporary storage. According to The Daily Egg, you can clear the cache by using a dedicated WordPress plugin. In some cases, your hosting service may also provide a cache clearer for you.
Reduce the Number of HTTP Requests
Reducing the number of HTTP requests is another crucial element in optimizing your website’s performance. Again, with images, compressing them will help cut down the number of HTTP requests. On top of that, though, you may need to clear out your website’s image gallery. Deleting unnecessary images could make a huge difference in speeding up your website.
Minification is also another way of reducing the number of HTTP requests. According to PageSpeed Insights, “Minification refers to the process of removing unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the resource is processed by the browser – e.g. code comments and formatting, removing unused code, using shorter variable and function names, and so on.”
Eliminating code that isn’t necessary to execute from JavaScript, CSS, and other programming languages can expedite your website’s performance.
Reduce Plugins
If there are too many plugins on your website, it can make it both laggy and SEO-unfriendly. This ties into the reduction of HTTP requests. Too many plugins can lead to an increased amount of HTTP requests, which, in turn, slow down your website even more.
Take them out to evaluate which plugins are necessary for your website and eliminate them as needed. WP Pluginsify notes that six to 10 plugins can keep your website optimized for performance, but exceeding 15 can be problematic.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Think about it: how are people accessing the Internet for the most part nowadays? According to Perficient, “Globally, 68.1% of all website visits in 2020 came from mobile devices—an increase from 63.3% in 2019.” Therefore, it is imperative to make your website mobile-friendly.
How do you do this? First, you’ll want to choose a website design that is conducive to mobile devices. That means choosing a mobile-responsive theme for your website that allows for maximum readability, as well as reduced load times. On top of readability, you’ll want to truncate as much as possible so that said readability is digestible for users. Aim for a bigger font than you traditionally use on a desktop site.
And just like keeping your desktop site optimized for performance, you’ll want to compress all images and remove any unnecessary code, which will decrease the loading times.
How ONE18MEDIA Can Make Your Website Optimized for Performance
ONE18MEDIA’s dedicated and experienced professionals are trained in keeping client websites optimized for performance. From SEO optimization to the ins-and-outs of web development, we have all the tools to ensure your website is up to par in the competitive digital environment. To learn more about ONE18MEDIA can leave your website optimized for performance, please visit our website and get in touch with us today!