Another reason page speed matters is because it can influence consumers' perception of your brand. If your web pages take too long to load or anything goes wrong during the process, it can make you look unprofessional, and your website unreliable. If you want to run a highly-effective website, therefore, it's necessary to focus on optimizing page speed.

The first step in doing that is figuring out how your pages are currently performing. Before making any changes to your site, you'll need to gauge your web pages' performance. There are various tools you can use to test and measure page speed.

Two popular solutions are Pingdom Website Speed Test and GTmetrix , which are both beginner-friendly options. However, we recommend starting with Google PageSpeed Insights. This is an easy-to-use tool that enables you to measure and test the speed of your web pages on both desktop and mobile devices.

Plus, as a Google-supported tool, it can help you make sure you're hitting the performance benchmarks required for high search result placements.

To use PageSpeed Insights, simply enter the URL of the web page you want to test into the text field, and select the Analyze button:. PageSpeed Insights will then analyze the content on your page, and score it on a scale of 0 to Below your score, you'll find a list of suggestions on ways you can improve page loading speed:.

It's worth noting that you'll get a separate score and list of suggestions for both the desktop and mobile versions of your site. This information gives you a solid starting point for gauging how fast your web pages are, and offers tangible actions you can take to improve page loading speeds.

Now that you understand the importance of page speed and how to test your site's performance, it's time to work on improving this key metric. The hosting provider you use plays a major role in your website's management and performance.

That includes its page speeds. One of the worst mistakes you can make is settling for mediocre hosting in order to get a lower monthly rate. Cheap hosting often translates to poor performance. It can mean sharing resources between multiple websites on an overloaded server, which can end up straining your page loading times.

On the other hand, there are a handful of performance-focused hosting solutions you can use such as SiteGround and Kinsta that provide a powerful platform designed for speed. Usually, these providers don't offer shared hosting, which means you'll never have to worry about other websites draining your pool of potential resources.

Images help enhance the appearance of your web pages and increase the quality of your content. However, large images can also delay loading times. Therefore, one of the easiest ways to increase page loading speeds is to compress and optimize your images. This can include changing their file formats, enabling lazy loading, and compressing images through lossy or lossless compression.

There are a variety of image optimization plugins you can use for this purpose, such as WP Smush. After you install and activate this plugin, it will automatically resize and compress your images without affecting their quality.

It includes features for lossless compression, lazy loading, and even optimizing images in bulk. Another very effective plugin for WordPress websites is the SiteGround Optimizer plugin. Additionally, the plugin provides an option for using the WebP image format, lazy loading, and other image optimization features that can significantly decrease your media size and improve your loading speed.

The plugin is completely free and easy to use. If you're not using WordPress as your CMS , you might want to try with tinypng. Too many redirects on your website can really hurt loading times.

Every time a page redirects somewhere else , it prolongs the HTTP request and response process. Of course, in some cases redirects may be necessary, such as when you're moving to a new domain.

However, eliminating unnecessary redirects on your site can result in significantly lower page loading times.

There are a few different ways to reduce redirects in WordPress. One is to avoid creating unnecessary ones when building internal links and menus. Another is making sure your Top-Level Domain TLD resolves with a maximum of one redirection.

If you need help identifying redirects that are incorrectly set up on your site, you can use the Patrick Sexton Redirect mapper tool :. This will uncover any duplicate redirects. You can also use a tool such as Screaming Frog to identify all the redirects on your site and where they lead to.

This should make it easier to identify redirects that aren't serving a purpose. Then you can delete the ones you don't need via your site's. htaccess file. Caching is one of the most effective ways to speed up your web pages. Logically combine files for more efficient server compression and quicker downloading.

Images often account for the majority of total page weight, so minimizing the size of image files can have a big impact. Along with minimizing page weight, the other fundamental strategy to maximize page speed is optimizing the way data is retrieved and transferred from the web server and loaded by the web browser.

Prioritize initially-visible, above-the-fold content and eliminate render blocking resources. Async, defer, lazy loading, on-demand - all the hits.

Alternatively, if you have a lot of separate styles for different devices and browsers, you may want to split your stylesheet into multiple files and use a media query import to only load the appropriate styles.

But if your header has a lot of images or you have a video at the top of the page, then it may be worth investigating how to optimize these assets to improve initial load speed. See below for more details on how to approach optimizing. Same as above.

CDNs can help load your whole page faster, which gives a small boost to FCP. See below for more details on using a CDN. If you only paid attention to First Contentful Paint, you may think that all you need to do to crush your PageSpeed Insights score is defer and load all of your resources later to make that top portion of your website load quickly.

First Input Delay is also related to Total Blocking Time TBT and Time to Interactive TTI metrics. In other words, if your code takes a long time to finish loading, it will prevent the user from interacting with the website, and there will be a delay or lag time between when they click to when the action takes place.

First Input Delay is based on real-world user data and Core Web Vitals. In terms of improving the performance of these three metrics, the solutions are also similar but not identical. You can think of JavaScript like a separate train track for the browser. So the longer it spends reading and executing the JavaScript when the page first loads, the longer the delay will be if the user begins interacting with the page.

One usual suspect for slow input response is that the website is still loading in all kinds of third-party tools, widgets, and apps to your website. Every time you add things like Facebook, Drift, Intercom, HotJar, or other third-party tools and services to your website, it adds a bit of code that will need to be loaded and rendered on the page.

So if the browser is trying to fetch some JavaScript from a third-party website on a slow server, it could cause significant delays. And you probably only use a few of them. To get a full list of the third-party JavaScript loading on your page, refer to your PageSpeed Insights report or run a separate Lighthouse report.

Now, using this information, you can decide which of these are critical and which can safely be removed. Looking at the PageSpeed Insights report, you should see a section that references unused JavaScript:.

The most common way to speed up load time is to reduce file size. And with JavaScript, there are two main strategies:. Either of these could help make your code more performant. Largest Contentful Paint LCP is a metric that measures how long it takes for the largest block of content on a page to be visible to the user.

Unlike FCP, it looks at the load time for the largest block of image or text on the page regardless of its position or order. Before you begin working to optimize your LCP, you may want to determine which part of your page is considered the largest block of content.

You can do this by using Chrome DevTools in your browser to identify the LCP resource on any specific page. Removing or deferring render-blocking resources can help the main content load more quickly.

But keep in mind that if these resources significantly change the layout or structure of the page, it could actually change which block is considered the largest and slow down LCP rather than improve it! You can take this strategy one step further. Especially if the largest block of content is an image.

You can apply what is known as a PRPL Preload, Render, Precache, Lazy load framework to target specific resources on your page and to load first in the queue. If that image is the largest content block, then it will dramatically improve your LCP score.

Lazy loading is a design pattern used in software development to improve performance and reduce resource consumption.

It involves postponing the initialization or loading of an object until it is needed. In addition to async rendering options, this framework provides other strategies for optimizing the rendering path.

For instance, if you have a hero image that is the largest block on the page, then you might want to pre-load that image on each page using a snippet like this:.

Bigger files take longer to load. This applies to images, scripts, videos, fonts, and anything else on your page that may be loaded as part of the largest content block. Any resources necessary to render the largest content block will need to be fully loaded before LCP is calculated.

As a result, the website works slower and also security issues can appear. As time passes, the number of plugins grows, while some of them may not be used anymore.

We recommend checking out all the plugins you have installed and deleting unnecessary ones. First, run the performance tests on your page to find out which plugins are slowing down your website. Not only does the website speed depend on the number of installed plugins but also on their quality.

Try to avoid plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles or generate a lot of database queries. The best solution is to keep only the necessary ones and ensure that they are kept up to date. Minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files If your website contains a lot of JavaScript and CSS files, it leads to a large number of HTTP requests when your website visitors want to access particular files.

If you reduce the number of JavaScript and CSS files this will undoubtedly speed up your website. Try to group all JavaScript into one and also do so with all CSS files. This will reduce the overall number of HTTP requests.

There are a lot of tools to minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files quickly. For instance, you can use WillPeavy , Script Minifier , or Grunt tools. Use website caching In case there are a lot of users accessing the page at one time servers work slowly and need more time to deliver the web page to each user.

Caching is the process of storing the current version of your website on the hosting and presenting this version until your website is updated. The approaches to website caching depend on the platform your website is developed on. For WordPress for instance, you can use the following plugins: W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache.

If you use VPS or a dedicated server, you can also set up caching under your general settings. Implement Gzip Compression Gzip Compression is an effective way to reduce the size of files. It minimizes the HTTP requests and reduces the server response time. Gzip compresses the files before sending them to the browser.

On the user side, a browser unzips the files and presents the contents. This method can work with all files on your website. You can enable Gzip on your website by adding some lines of the code or via a utility called gzip. Database optimization in CMS Database optimization is the an effective way to increase performance.

If you use a content management system CMS packed with complex plugins, the database size increases and your website works slower.

For instance, the WordPress CMS stores comments, blog posts, and other information that take up a lot of data storage. Each CMS requires its own optimization measures and also has a number of specific plugins. For Wordpress, for example, you may consider WP-Optimize.

Reduce the use of web fonts Web fonts have become very popular in website design. Unfortunately, the use of web fonts has a negative impact on the speed of page rendering.

Web fonts add extra HTTP requests to external resources. The following measures will help you reduce the size of web font traffic: Use modern formats WOFF2 for modern browsers; Include only those character sets that are used on the site; Choose only the needed styles This message is provided by the hosting to browsers or search engines when the accessed content of a page no longer exists.

In order to detect and correct a error, you can use error detection tools and plugins. As we mentioned, additional plugins can negatively affect your website speed, so we advise running the resource through external tools for error detection.

If these dead links no longer bring any visits and thus never consume your server resource, then you may leave them as they are. If these pages still have some traffic coming, consider setting redirects for external links and fixing the link addresses for the internal ones. Reduce redirects Website redirects create additional HTTP requests which negatively impact performance.

We advise to keep them to a minimum or eliminate them entirely. First, you should identify all redirects on you page by running a site scan.

You can use Screaming Frog to quickly identify redirects. Then you must check if they serve a necessary purpose and leave only the critical ones. Use prefetching techniques Prefetching entails reading and executing instructions before a user initiates them.

The technique is rather common. It works well if you can anticipate user actions and, for instance, load some content or links in advance. Usually, modern browsers allow for prefetching by default as they assume user behavior patterns. There are three main types of prefetching: DNS-prefetching.

Not so long ago, 30 KB was considered as the ideal web page size. And that included images, content, graphics, and code making the entire page. The popularity of CSS and JavaScript ripped apart the ceiling of 30 KB page size in delivering enriched website user experience.

Yet, modern websites coded in CSS are better at downloading content from hosting servers to requesting browsers efficiently and accurately.

The following best practices ensure a speed-optimized CSS delivery:. Tools such as Autoptimize , WP Rocket , Cache Enabler , CloudFlare CDN , and W3 Total Cache are some of the most popular tools available for minifying JavaScript and CSS. If you are a Kinsta customer you can take advantage of the code minification feature that is built directly into the MyKinsta dashboard.

This allows customers to quickly and easily enable automatic CSS and JavaScript minification with a simple click. Reducing the number of client-server requests in delivering website content to Web browsers is an integral part of website speed optimization.

Webmasters can achieve this by not making too many folks with CSS, HTML and JavaScript requests. That is to say, optimize, minify and squish all unnecessary and compressible code lines.

Minification is particularly important for inline JavaScript and external files not cached. Google recommends minifying all JavaScript files over bytes of size, and a shaving off a minimum of 25 bytes to produce any noticeable difference toward page load time.

A rigorous approach toward designing speed optimized website would incorporate a strong intent on eliminating unnecessary bytes from the code.

Utilizing all the coding space available, deleting extra spaces, indentation and line spaces while maintaining readability of the code reduces the overall size of website core and front-end files. And for websites already developed without this strategy in perspective, combining multiple server requests for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into single ones effectively slashes sizeable chunks from page load times.

Monitoring page load performance changes in response to implementing each minification process individually ensure that only the unnecessary code and spaces are deleted.

Minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML share common benefits: reduced network latency, fewer HTML requests, enhanced compression, faster browser downloading and execution, ultimately boosting page speed and yielding higher scores on website speed measuring tools. Additional website functionality with plugins comes at a price: performance degradation.

Unfortunately, webmasters deploy a myriad of plugins to add attractive but often unnecessary features such as gravatar, profile tools, website stats and font tools — some even use 10 different plugins for social media integration. The only benefit here is successfully avoiding manual coding.

Many popular websites carry as much as 80 plugins. Yet, the number is not entirely a concern if the installed plugins are developed well to avoid complex actions and expensive server processing.

If the answer to all these questions is YES , your reaction to the plugin in question should be a huge NO! A lot of WordPress experts recommend not using too many plugins.

But many well-performing websites host over 80 plugins, until they install one low-quality plugin that adds half a second to page load time. Similarly, using 10 plugins for simple and unique tasks is much better than deploying one plugin to perform all of the complex tasks by itself.

Exceptions include high-quality SEO plugins by credible developers, such asYoast SEO , All In One SEO Pack free WordPress SEO plugins and the likes. Revision management is one of the perks that WordPress has to offer. The CMS automatically keeps track of the content created on the CMS and makes all of it available for future changes.

To the server, this costs unnecessary processing through additional database entries not actually required in the first place. Controlling the number of revisions stored relieves the website core of useless burden. Check out our in-depth guide on how to optimize WordPress revisions for faster performance.

This database gets crowded over time, not only with unnecessary content and post revisions, but also with garbage data. Database optimization revolves around getting rid of garbage data and useless content from cluttered databases, shrinking them in size and making it easier for website hosting servers to fetch requested content efficiently, within minimum processing cycles.

This can also involve ensuring that you are using InnoDB for your MySQL database tables, as opposed to MyISAM. Learn how to convert myISAM to InnoDB. Especially on older and large sites, this can be the culprit for slow query times on your site due to autoloaded data that is left behind from third-party plugins and themes.

Change as appropriate. Compression According to Google , every day the cyber world sees 99 years of human years wasted due to uncompressed Web content.

And although most of the latest Web browsers support content compression capabilities, not every website delivers compressed contents. Visitors to these bandwidth-hogging websites experience insanely slow interactions with Web pages. Primary reasons for this unfavorable and mostly unintentional website behavior include misconfigured hosting servers, Web proxies, old or buggy browsers and antivirus software.

Uncompressed content hurts bandwidth-constrained users receiving the Web content in agonizingly lengthy page load times. Server: On it! Browser: Ouch! Okay, client-server communication is perhaps a bit more formal and less dramatic than the above narrative.

Most of the problem lies in the way client-server communication goes in the HTML world. HTML files making almost the entire Web content includes several redundant code instances. Google recommends the following compression tactics to deliver website content efficiently:.

Not following the above recommendations actually increases file size and page load times due to the overhead of compression and decompression. Developers crave simplicity in website design code. Website code easier to create, read and maintain leads to efficient website development processes.

This includes using the available code functions frequently to cut short extensive coding for specific website functionality. However, adding too many extraneous loops and unnecessary code lines increases page rendering times by a few milliseconds.

Influx a torrent of website traffic, and the milliseconds compound to plunge page speed well below acceptable standards. Webmasters can reduce these response times by delivering cached copies of the requested content instead of rendering it repeatedly in response to every single user request that pings their server.

Web cache is the mechanism of temporarily storing copies of web content to satisfy subsequent user requests from the cache database when specific conditions are met. This process reduces the number of client-server round trips taken in delivering static website content to requesting browsers.

Website owners can enable caching with the following add-ons and configurations when hosting service providers do not provide server-side caching:. Along with static cacheable content, websites also host dynamic information containing unique attributes changing regularly for every end-user.

This is the art of caching smaller elements of non-cacheable dynamic website content. These time-and-resource consuming processes are circumvented by delivering the desired output stored as a cached copy. Fragment caching stores the output of some code blocks that remain unchanged across varied versions of the dynamic content.

When the code runs and reaches the code block cached for a predetermined time, the server queries and delivers the cached output of this code instead of executing it repeatedly until the time limit reaches. The end result is a cache-optimized website content for maximum page speed even for ecommerce and membership-based websites handling intensely dynamic content.

Kinsta actually provides four different types of caching , all of which are all automatically done at the software or server-level. So there is no need to mess with third-party plugins.

CDN is an extension of cache optimization designed to supercharge website performance aimed specifically at globally dispersed web traffic. CDNs consist of a network of servers hosting cached copies of web pages.

Internet visitors requesting this information are directed to the nearest server within this network based on their geographic location.

Traditional benefits of CDN including performance boost, high availability, and page rank collectively lift business bottom line. Check out all the reasons why you should be using a CDN. WordPress essentially democratized the web by empowering citizens of the cyberworld to create their own blogs and launch products and services online with minimal investments.

In general, website owners leverage one of the following hosting services to keep their websites up and running:. Among these, employing managed WordPress hosting for end-to-end website development and management services is the most cost-effective and productive option for maintaining an ultra-high performance website.

Features of managed hosting services impacting page speed and website performance include:. With the release of PHP 7 came huge performance gains! So big in fact, that it should be a priority over a lot of the small optimizations you might play around with on your WordPress site.

The following benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements with PHP 7 over its previous iterations. PHP 7 allows the system to execute twice as many requests per second in comparison with the PHP 5.

We also ran our own PHP benchmarks. And similarly to the benchmarks above, we saw that PHP 7. PHP 7. The performance gap between PHP 5. PHP 8. Congratulations and thanks for reading it. We hope you found at least a couple of great bits of advice that you can act upon now!

At Kinsta, we provide the fastest WordPress hosting services and with our infrastructure you can rest assured that all the server-side optimizations are taken care of. Last, but not least, if you found our guide helpful please share it with your friends and followers!

This is a great post Mark, Page speed is an important point if you want your website rank higher. Well written Mark. All these performance tips are right on the way of a faster web app. Another room for improvement is to avoid CSS expressions. Thanks for sharing informative informative article.

Lot of of stuff is here with lot of information about every subject. Long but great article Mark : You can also seed up your website by inlining the above the fold css. Its easy to generate it using tools like the one from sitelocity.

com Do you know a better one? Nice post, but i am very lazy to do it myself : I give this job speedupgency company and now my site loading speed is 2. your website is amazing and your articles that you post is very informative.

I always see your website and always get new interesting information. Thanks for it. The speed of compression must be faster than the time taken in delivering the content uncompressed. Hey Leonardo, Those GZIP ranges are what Google used to recommend.

We appreciate you checking. Thank you for the article. Do I need to specify the lowest network speed we are global site to make sure the website performs well in majority of cases?

Where can I get some examples of network speed in various geographies? Hey MJ! I have a potentially stupid question because I think I know the answer. The client wanting their images will not mind waiting for their page to load as it would be expected, but the rest of the users will need a fast loading site.

Any way around this? The only person that would really be impacted by it is the person loading it. You can see how many times this post has been shared, that tells you how much helpful this article is.

Keep updating the users. Thank you! For any internet site, the loading time is a major factor in developing now. One point I want to tell you that after I moved to Genesis or magazine framework, my blog loading speed has decreased by over 2.

About the images, not so many users are well aware of Photoshop, so for the alternative to optimize graphics there are lots of websites to help you to compress image size that matter greatly on the entire size of your HTML page rendering on the user side. Also, I switched to a dedicated server and the faster CDN Content Delivery Network that not only work for WordPress for the Blogger as well.

The use of CDN and can cause a significant difference in site loading time. I used to make changes to HTML and keep an eye on site loading. A dedicated hosting including regular tweaking can make a difference.

Great Post! It worked for me and I have shared this one on my social media handles. The author has explained in clear terms how the product pages should be optimized.

I followed the steps on my site and in few weeks I was able to draw targeted traffic. These tips are easy to implement and the best part about this post is the easy explanation that the author has offered to some of the common problems that small online store owners like me face.

The website performance is an important factor. But, from my web development experience. I should make a few observations. For example Magento 2 is a monster although it is is one of best solutions for ecommerce. Also, if you use Magento 2 you need to use extensions. Sometimes Magento developers did bad extensions.

Well, it is a problem. Right now, only super slow sites are really impacted by the Google speed update but this might change at some point.

Page speed is very important, if I am checking a website and it is very slow, I would not waste my time and just transfer or look for another website.

By submitting this form: You agree to the processing of the submitted personal data in accordance with Kinsta's Privacy Policy , including the transfer of data to the United States. You also agree to receive information from Kinsta related to our services, events, and promotions.

You may unsubscribe at any time by following the instructions in the communications received. And speed sells! Highlighting the Key Aspects of Website Speed Optimization: Chapter 1 — Introduction to Website Speed Optimization Chapter 2 — Website Performance Impacts Business Success Chapter 3 — Speed Optimized Mobile Website Overshadows Desktop Chapter 4 — Common Business Mistakes that Kill Website Performance Chapter 5 — Website Speed Testing — Identify Performance Bottlenecks!

Chapter 6 — How to Improve Website Speed? Chapter 1: Introduction to Website Speed Optimization What Exactly is Page Speed? Page load time There are three core aspects necessary to understand page speed in the context of user experience and website performance: The view of time taken in delivering the requested material along with the accompanying HTML content to the browser.

Browser response to page load requests. The view of end-users as the requested web page renders on the browser — this is the ultimate empirical measure of page load speed.

How Slow? Slow 47 percent of ecommerce customers expect page load times of less than two seconds before they consider leaving — 40 percent of users would abandon the site at the third second of waiting, before a performance analytics tool even captures their presence on the site.

And what happens when they speed up? Speed increase Acceptable Website Performance — The Neuroscience and Rhythm milliseconds. Acceptable website performance 1 second of page load time does suffice in maintaining a seamless flow of thought — users feel in control of their Web browsing activities, and the mental stress is not aggravated unless the website fails to respond as desired.

The Pragmatic Psychological Conundrum However, abandoning a website due to slow page speed is not always the quickest path to access the desired information on the web. Play with human psychology Passengers at the airport had to take a 1-minute walk to the baggage claim and waited there for 7 minutes to receive their bags.

Core Components of the guide include: Chapter 2: Website Performance Impacts Business Success. Chapter 3: Speed Optimized Mobile Website Overshadows Desktop Internet Success. Chapter 4: Common Business Mistakes that Kill Website Performance.

Chapter 5: Website Speed Testing — Identify Performance Bottlenecks! Chapter 6: How to Improve Website Speed? Chapter 2: Website Performance Impacts Business Success Performance Impacts Sales W ebsite performance is user experience — the power of page speed, translating into attractive online shopping experience inspires sales figures and eventually determines online business success.

A: Dramatically, is the only answer! Abandon slow websites While service and product quality apparently has the biggest impact on business sales, converting website visitors into purchasing customers in the cyber world largely depends on developing a positive customer impression.

Performance Impacts Conversion As the most important and powerful internet metric for online businesses, conversion rates holistically depend on website KPIs in establishing competitive advantages for online retail platforms. Fast load times equal better conversions Bringing potential customers to the doorstep of brick-and-mortar retail stores often requires a thoroughly planned marketing and advertisement campaign.

Conversion speed calculator Performance Impacts User Engagement User engagement statistics feed the cauldron of website analytics in developing the best strategies to optimize online sales. Underperforming websites For underperforming websites — notice underperformance being a relative term — page load times exceed human limitations, whereas failure to process user requests gives the false impression of ignorance or incompetence in delivering the desired response efficiently and accurately.

High-performing websites High-performing websites on the other hand — notice high-performing being a relative term as well — impact three parameters that determine user engagement: user feelings, user mental states, and user interactions.

Performance Impacts OpEx and Revenue While investing in website performance optimization adds to the CapEx in favor of shaving off a few seconds in page load times, the return is inevitably seen in the shape of rising revenues and shrinking operational cost and hardware investments.

Performance Impacts Usability Websites with the steepest learning curve achieve the highest customer lock-in. Usability traits End-users expect the following traits affecting the usability of websites: Easy to operate, navigate and understand. Directly deliver relevant information and controls being sought.

Accessible across all device form factors, machines, operating systems, browsers and geographic locations. Delivering legitimate, credible and high-quality information, products and services with minimal clicks and browser requests. Chapter 3: Speed Optimized Mobile Website Overshadows Desktop M obile is the future of everything wired.

Mobile vs desktop Desktop internet marketing, on the other hand, is so last decade-ish. Mobile vs. Desktop — Why does it Matter? citizens own mobile devices. These mobile users average 1. Compromising these core aspects of mobile websites can force online businesses into facing the obvious negative implications including: Low Mobile Purchases: Mobile internet shoppers have a shorter attention span and lower patience than desktop internet users.

Losing Competition: According to a survey of over a thousand U. adult smartphone users, almost 75 percent of the respondents said they prefer revisiting mobile ecommerce sites that deliver high-end mobile user experience.

Losing Brand Value: Poorly designed mobile websites that simply shrink the HTML of full desktop website version for visitors to zoom in and out in navigating through mobile Web pages makes users less likely to engage with the company in the future.

These consequences negate the following primary objectives of reaching customers via mobile internet: Expanding customer-base.

New advertisement options. Offering quality services efficiently at user convenience. And most concerning, the inevitability in productively embracing mobile web for business development. Web objectives High-Performance Mobile Website and the Competitive Space of High Conversions Considering the high volume of internet traffic using mobile devices for ecommerce purchases, high-performing mobile websites is an evident priority for ecommerce organizations.

Website revenue streams Nevertheless, the demand to satisfy the needs of mobile users will continue to rise exponentially. Search Engine Optimization of mobile websites is now a separate trade — and so is mobile website speed optimization, which constitutes of: High page speed Low page load times Efficient delivery of media-rich content Download speed Optimal site format Easy navigation and usability across the website And a fully functional website requiring minimal user-input in performing an otherwise complex task of mobile internet usage.

Average page load times For ecommerce merchants, however, 5 seconds of page load time is perhaps sufficient to put visitors off toward a faster alternative.

And for business owners employing Web developers to design highly responsive and speed-optimized mobile websites here are 60 Awesome Web Development Tools that may help you , the improvements should be sought in the following three ingredients of mobile website anatomy: Fluid grids Flexible images Media queries And a design focus on the following mobile website elements: Masthead Image gallery Product description Auxiliary information Footer Customers appreciate fast responding websites and ultra-low page load times.

Mobile purchasing 60 percent of consumers use mobile devices exclusively to make quick purchase decisions.

Chapter 4: Common Business Mistakes that Kill Website Performance O nline marketplaces — like battlegrounds of the ancient Greeks — are high-stake competitive platforms where only the most diligent survive.

The fastest website load time wins The aptly named Gap of Death, the interval between expected page load time of under 2 seconds and average site load time of 5 seconds expands or contracts due to surprisingly neglected website optimization tactics and business decisions.

On the other hand, website owners wary of speed optimization tactics can aim for higher website performance by avoiding the following deadly mistakes as well: Mediocre Web Hosting Service The mistake of opting for a mediocre Web hosting service can live forever. Web hosting services Perhaps then, investing time and money in pursuing the highest quality web hosting services is key to maintaining high-performance websites generating vast revenue streams by attracting visitor attention efficiently and accurately.

Giving Way to Bandwidth Thieves Website speed optimization is an ongoing and evolving process and goes well beyond subscribing to the best web hosting services in the world.

The main factor under your control when it comes to TTFB is server processing time. Therefore you can try some of the tips recommended by Google to improve TTFB :. A TTFB below ms is considered great. The ms to ms range is considered normal and okay.

A TTFB consistently higher than ms will need to be investigated. And Sematext Experience can help you with that along with monitoring other Web Vitals metrics as well.

This ties into the previous point about minimizing time to first byte. You should look into upgrading the hosting service plan or if you are using WordPress, consider using a managed service that is well known for stable and high-performance hosting.

You should enable gzip compression on your HTTP servers. Gzip compression minimizes the size of HTTP responses for certain file types. It is usually used for textual responses only.

This should reduce the load times and save on bandwidth. I already mentioned that you should try to load both JS and CSS in a single request for each. This is accomplished by minifying and combining separate JS and CSS files into single bundles. Browsers have a limit on parallel network requests so if your website needs 3 requests in total to load, it will be most likely faster than if it had to load 30 different resources.

Developers can use tools like webpack to have the convenience of using multiple files while developing the website and to have the performance benefit of a single bundle when deploying to production. But in general, combining files means exactly that, all files are copied as-is into a single file.

Minification is the process of optimizing the size of JavaScript and CSS files by removing or shortening symbols in the source code. The output is functionally equivalent, but not entirely human-readable.

What most optimized websites end up doing is first minifying JavaScript and CSS files and then combining them into single bundles. That is called synchronous loading. It will continue parsing the page while the script is loaded. There are different prefetching and preloading techniques that you can use to give hints to the browser about which resources will be required to render the page before the browser actually needs those resources.

DNS prefetching. You can tell the browser that certain domain names will need to be resolved to an IP address before the browser actually sees resources from that domain name.

This can seem like a small optimization, but it can make a difference when you have exhausted other techniques. TCP preconnect. Much like the DNS prefetch method, preconnect will resolve the DNS but it will also make the TCP handshake, and optionally the TLS handshake.

This should be reserved for when you really know that the next step a user will take is to go to a certain page.

You can instruct the browser to prerender the complete page, along with downloading all the required assets by specifying the URL like this:. Plugins are reusable pieces of functionality, usually used in content management systems like WordPress or other pre-built website platforms.

Plugins give website owners additional functionality such as analytics or the ability to leave comments on blog posts. But plugins come at a cost. Each plugin will almost certainly load additional CSS and JavaScript files. Some plugins will increase the TTFB time as well because they require additional processing on the server for each page request.

So I would recommend going through your plugins list and making sure that you really need each plugin.

You should delete any plugins that are not critical for your website. Caching is the process of saving a version of your files in a temporary storage location — a cache — that can be accessed faster.

There are lots of advantages to enabling browser caching as it can reduce bandwidth consumption, increase load times , reduce latency , and the workload of the server. The main downside is that basically there will always be at least two versions of your website at any given time.

This can cause issues if you are running a real-time service that relies on accurate data but even this can be addressed to some degree forcing subsection of the cache to clear when new data is imported.

The first step to improving the performance of your website is to measure it. Measuring the performance requires specific tools, and ongoing monitoring is a must if you want to be alerted if your changes are improving the performance or if performance is degraded over time.

There are two approaches to website monitoring: synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring. synthetic monitoring where we compare the two types of monitoring. In either case, we suggest using cloud-based website monitoring tools so you can focus on growing your business instead of building or managing your own tools.

Sematext Cloud offers solutions for both synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring. Try it free for 14 days!

Looking for more tips on how to speed up your WordPress website? Check out this short video below for more details:. Improving website performance can be challenging, especially with the vast differences in devices, connectivity, browsers, and operating systems, but it will have a significant positive impact on your business if your business relies on your website as one of the main channels for reaching your customers.

Spend some time looking into the monitoring tool results, make changes on the website, and then compare the performance before and after the changes.