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.
Follow Suggestions
This is purely common sense, once you have the data required on how to improve your website simply follow the advice. A number of the tools I provided links for earlier offer great explanations on how to improve the factors they grade the site on. I’d like to point out that the Google PageSpeed offers the best selection of advice with regard to the SEO aspect of search rankings, achieving the highest score through PageSpeed will almost guarantee that the SEO ranking of your site will be improved.
These suggestions tend to be generic rather than specific, meaning that they will improve the speed of any website regardless of framework being used. I would highly recommend following the suggestions provided by the tools listed to try and achieve the highest possible score, obviously in the real world this is very difficult but generally speaking if you can maintain a good score on these tools your site is in pretty good standing.
WordPress Pitfalls To Avoid
As an avid WordPress user for many years I felt this section needed to stand on its own as it is often overlooked by many of the performance related posts. If you aren’t using WordPress these suggestions might not apply to you but can also be translated to most other content management systems.
Avoid using more plugins than is absolutely necessary for your site to function, these are often very resource hungry and can bring even a site with the best optimization work down to a crawl. Using multiple plugins that claim to speed your site can often lead to reduction in speed because of misconfigurations. The same can be said for JavaScript plugins, avoid using more than is required as they increasing the amount of data required to be downloaded on a users machine, even if methods are in place to use CDNs this still increases page load time.
My general recommendation for WordPress is to keep as lite an install as possible, even to a point of not including some WordPress functions that aren’t being used in your theme. This will help keep the site up to speed.
Profit!
Following the advice in this article should prove a good starting point for increasing general website performance and will stand you in good stead to improve almost everything to do with your online presence. If web performance is something that interests you I’d highly recommend looking into the subject in more detail as there is a wealth of information available.
Update: If you would like to read more, Tung Tran wrote an excellent article you can read here. He goes into far greater detail on specifics especially relating to WordPress that you might find really interesting.
Also published on Medium.