Increasing website performance is a huge topic that is often overlooked by developers, especially novices. This is becoming an even larger problem with the increase of readily available JavaScript plugins and ever growing bloat from CMS providers. Site performance is not only a defining factor in the SEO ranking you receive from search engines like Google but it is also the number 1 factor in deciding if a user stays on your site or not. If you can improve performance you can almost certainly improve customer retention or any other number of metrics. This article aims to provide an absolute basic example on how to increase a websites performance.
Analyze Site Speed
First things first you need to check what the current state of your website’s performance is before you try and improve it. The fact might be you could have an absolutely blazing fast site without any of these suggestions required. The main tools I use in this area are; Google PageSpeed, GTmetrix & WebPageTest. These three tools all offer a similar selection of tools however it is a good idea to use a combination rather than rely on a single source. One good feature about WebPageTest is that it offers the ability to see how the site will perform from different geographic locations and from different browsers.
