There are different ways to optimize a website. Some steps are easy to apply. While others can be confusing for inexperienced people. To avoid problems, we recommend you review our Ultimate Guide For Website Optimization.
Optimizing a website is an indispensable part of its correct development and maintenance. Sometimes, this action is not applied by webmasters and presents problems.
If you want to save a few dollars and help increase your traffic, you must learn how to optimize your website. If you haven’t done any optimization to your website, check out our Ultimate Guide For Website Optimization.
Ultimate Guide For Website Optimization
Website Performance Optimization
One of the main factors to check to optimize a website is its loading speed. According to statistics, users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Also, they show that about 80% of users will not return to a website with poor performance.
Even if your content is more informative than your competitors, if you don’t have the best performance and loading speed, you’re out. Before proceeding with the following tips, check the status of your website.
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Website Speed Test
To know the speed of your website, use one of the following online tools:
- Google Pagespeed: Tool created by Google with which you can check the speed of your website.
- Pingdom: Tool to check the speed of any website for free.
- Gtmetrix: Ideal tool to see the performance of a website. Also, measure the estimated load time, the weight of the web in MB, and the number of requests.
If your website works with WordPress, we recommend the WP performance profiler plugin to increase the speed of your site.
Load Test Your Website
To test the loading speed of your website, we recommend Load Impact or Blitz. With these tools, you will understand what users need to have a good experience on your website.
Once you have optimized all the aspects related to load speed, we move on to other important details.
Image size
Reducing the size of the images used is another of the easiest techniques to optimize your website. If the images are in high resolution and are of considerable dimensions, your page will be slow.
A good way to work with images is to use the JPG format. They have great resolution and do not take up much space. You can also use PNG but do it to a lesser extent because they are heavier files.
One trick we give our clients to reduce the size of images without losing quality is to compress them using tools such as ImageOptim or JPEGmini.
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The recommendation we give to all our clients is that
their images should not exceed 200 KB.
Web fonts
Although using a personal font will give a unique style to your website, it will have a negative impact on the speed of your page. Web fonts block rendering. So they add more HTTP requests. The transfer delay of a font file depends on its size in bytes.
So what do we do with web fonts?
- Select font families that you really need
- Host fonts locally
- Use CSS Shorthand, a technique for combining many CSS lines into a single command.
Our Web Design in Chicago is tailored to your company to achieve the highest customer satisfaction, with the least investment.
Detect 404 errors
404 errors can be quite resource-consuming. Sometimes, the server may need up to 60-100 MB of memory. This is why no one wants to have any 404 error on their website.
Besides, 404 errors could affect the legitimacy of your project or business. If a user discovers that a company does not manage its site correctly, they lose trust. So it is very likely that the user will not come back and will go to the competition.
To detect and fix a 404 error, you can use error detection tools and plugins. Xenu’s Link Sleuth, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), and 404 Redirected Plugin For WordPress are some tools that will be of great help to you.
Reduce the number of HTTP requests
Through HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), a browser queries data from a server. In this way, the client and the host exchange requests and responses.
When many HTTP requests are made, pages take longer to load. This decreases the performance of the website. Thus, to avoid this situation and keep your site running, we recommend the following best practices:
- Remove images you don’t need
- Make your JavaScript asynchronous
- Use CSS Sprites
- Uninstall unused plugins
- Reduce the number of social buttons on your web pages such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
- Adjust Analytics settings
Use GZIP compression
GZIP is the best tool for compressing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML on the server. Using this technique allows you to save bandwidth and increase the speed of your website.
Your website visitors will see the difference using GZIP. Another tool we recommend is W3 Total Cache.
Hosting
The most popular hosting that most people use is shared hosting. It is the cheapest and as the name says, you share CPU, disk space, and RAM with other sites that also use the server. This is the main reason why shared hosting is not as fast as VPS or a dedicated server.
Although it represents an option for a larger budget, using a dedicated server that can be your own physical server guarantees you better optimization.
Reduce the number of plugins
Although plugins offer enhanced features for your website, the more you install plugins the more resources it takes to run them. As a result, the website runs slower and security problems can also occur.
The recommendation we give to our customers is to review the plugins they have installed and remove the unnecessary ones. The best solution is to keep only the necessary ones and make sure they are kept up to date.
Remember, if one day you installed it and never used it again, the best thing to do is to uninstall it. Just as in life, the things that are no longer useful, the best thing to do is to discard them.
Optimize the database
Databases are tables of information. For example, a standard database consists of tables for categories, users, entries, and comments. For faster access, clean up old and unused tables.
Also, need to optimize MySQL. The settings here are very specific according to the environment you use. For specialized help, do not hesitate to consult BoxMark Digital.
Our Web Design in Chicago is tailored to your company to achieve the highest customer satisfaction.
As you may have noticed, there are tips and steps to optimize a website. Whether you are knowledgeable or a first-time optimizer, this Ultimate Guide to Website Optimization will help you boost any website.
At BoxMark Digital we have a trained team that will give your website wings. They will position it in the top search engine rankings and perform a proper SEO audit to make your project work great.
If you want to increase your traffic and your potential customers, do not hesitate to contact us. We have packages for all businesses. Contact us now.
