Website monitoring, website performance, and optimization are some of the major focus points for businesses. Improving your website performance will also improve your online presence, brand value, and overall business performance. Most businesses make money from their online presence. If you are one of them then brace yourself because this insightful blog will take you on all the peak points from the importance of website performance, website speed test, factors that play a pivotal role, and finally tips from our experts on how you can make your website high-performing and ensure a smoother experience.
What is Website Performance Monitoring?
Website performance monitoring is a thorough process of examining the responsiveness and performance of a website. It is done in order to reduce default time, improve page loading, and provide the best possible user experience.
It is a broad indicator of the stability and technical health of your site. The most popular metrics are how quickly your site loads and if it is accessible.
Why is It Important?
Website performance monitoring is a strategic and planned act of tracking critical aspects of the website’s performance. It monitors the performance based on the parameters and important metrics. If performance monitoring is done effectively, it will allow you to detect and rectify performance-tanking sites and resolve the issues quickly. It also gives you a historical view of the stability of your site over time. If we go by principles, ideally you should be performing periodic checks to highlight what needs to be highlighted and what needs a fix. Also, if we work towards it practically then we would understand the website monitoring actually works in the background and fixes all the site’s issues. This process can also be gauged using website speed tests by identifying the concerns and providing continuous monitoring.
Website Performance Optimization Tips
1. Start with Reducing the Number of HTTP Requests
The access to web visitors for your website is not restricted. The number of visitors depends on how relevant your services are. The web browser uses HTTP requests to get various portions of the page from a web server; such as graphics, stylesheets, and scripts. Each request will incur some cost in establishing the connection between the browser and the remote web server. Like, if HTTP/1.1 is used, it exchanges information between the client’s system and remote server.
Furthermore, browsers often have a limit on the number of concurrent network requests. It is easy if you have a large number of requests in the queue, some of them will be denied if there are many elements in the queue.
The first tip from us is that you should remove all unnecessary requests. This is a predominately important step for your website’s rendering. You must also find which factors (especially what external factors) act as load and also categorize them into what is required. With optimization, your ultimate aim is to make your website light-weighted. You can also take a website speed test to analyze whether your website is light or not.
It is also advisable that you must switch to HTTP/2 which has multiple benefits like multitasking. They can easily send multiple files at the same time, over the same connection. This would eliminate the overhead cost of multiple requests.
Related: 8 Website Design Tricks to Improve Your Site’s Conversion Rate
2. Image Size and Optimization
Most business websites strongly rely on visuals, graphics, and templates. Your website’s speed will suffer if your photos are not compressed or optimized or if you utilize an excessively high resolution. You may learn how to use responsive pictures properly. For each template, you must consider a peculiar size. By specifying different image sizes, the browser will be able to choose the appropriate picture based on screen resolution.
In this process, you must ensure that you are loading the images of the right resolution across all device kinds. We are not saying to compromise the pixels of the image but you must ensure it fulfills the need. Do not go over the top. It’s time to optimize the picture size. You can use Shopify or Laravel to give your website a fantastic shape. Cutting down on a few pixels will allow you to achieve this.
Make sure you utilize the right file type. You can use any extended files such as JPEG and PNG for basic graphics.
3. Appropriate Use of Content Delivery Network (CDN)
If you have familiarity with CDN then you would know what impact it brings if you use it. For those who don’t know what a CDN-content delivery network is then here is an explanation: A content delivery network is a network of edge servers that are strategically located throughout the geographies. This is created with a common goal of providing digital material to consumers as quickly as possible. When there is a web visitor, it makes a request, and then there is routing to the nearest CDN edge server, which significantly reduces latency. A CDN also enables the users, regardless of geographical location, to receive quick loading content with a convenient user experience.
4. Mobile-First Approach by Writing Mobile-First Code
Smartphones have taken over the world and the growth is probably going to be equal to the humans on the planet. So, if you develop a website, ensure it has dynamic capability and interoperability by working on all devices and platforms. Typically, developers build and test websites on their own desktop computers before optimizing them for mobile devices. Depending on the decisions taken while creating the website, this might be an unpleasant procedure. But what if we utilized mobile devices to evaluate the website. That way, we have to write code first for mobile phones as well. You can also optimize the experience for mobile devices lately.
Related: Key Tips To Build Your First Small Business Website
5. Choose the Right Hosting Service Plan
The right hosting service plan is extremely important to get the right results. If you choose a shared web hosting company, the overall performance is in their hands. Because of that, we would advise you to consider upgrading your hosting service package. Always select a managed provider that is widely popular for providing reliable and high-performance hosting.
Fundamentally, there are three primary hosting options
- Shared Hosting – This generally is the low-cost hosting option. In this method, there is a sharing of the server’s resources with other customers.
- VPS – A Virtual Private Server is substantially quicker than a shared host. Because it is quicker it involves the use of multiple machines instead of one.
- Dedicated Systems – Dedicated servers are clearly the most costly of the three, and with this one, you effectively rent a full computer that you can generally configure as per the need.
6. LCP (Largest Content Element)
The load time is one of the most essential aspects that is newly introduced to identify factors involved in increasing load. LCP – largest content element measures how long it takes for the biggest “content element” (e.g., image, graphics, heading text, etc.) on your website to become visible within the viewport of your visitor. The establishment of LCP is a performance statistic by Lighthouse in the year 2020. This is to better quantify the loading experience of consumers.
7. TBT (Total Blocking Time)
It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that Page load time is directly proportional to the engagement you offer from your website. For a browser, there is the main thread that is responsible for loading the web page when a visitor visits the website. If this task lasts more than 50 milliseconds it is considered lengthy. For every millisecond after the first 50 MS, if there is a long task, it will be added to the Total Blocking Time. Total Blocking Time (TTB) is calculated by dividing the time between the first contentful paint (FCP) and the time to interactive (TTI).
If you adjust TBT the load responsiveness will improve, as will First Input Delay and First CPU Idle, resulting in a better user experience. Users will notice a delay if a web page cannot respond to user input for more than 50 milliseconds. Therefore when you develop a website, it is equally important to keep TBT in mind.
8. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
If you are wondering what is CLS? Well, CLS is a Cumulative Layout Shift on WordPress. You can identify it as the times you have been reading an article while the information pushes down due to some new ads or information. Or, if you have ever tried to click on a button and ended up clicking on another site because a new large graphic suddenly pushed the content down. These examples are layout shifts, which are triggered by some items on the page becoming unstable and shifting their position on the page.
The Cumulative Layout Shift meter is a representation of this where there is a core Web Vital metric. This gauges how aesthetically stable the page is. You can determine the visual stability by the number of unexpected layout adjustments that occur without interacting with the website. Every time the content changes, the CLS will vary.
Final Thoughts
Nowadays a website is the face of your business so if you want more business make sure your website is high-performing and interactive. Once you’ve settled on the best website monitoring solution for your needs, be sure to track these performance measures, as well as other crucial UX metrics.
