4 powerful tips to improve website performanceAt this point, website visitors expect websites to load quickly. Remember, we already live in a world of same-day delivery and instant updates, so quick loading websites are given right about now.

You might not realize it, but shaving milliseconds off of your load time can make a huge difference in conversions and the behaviors of your customer.

That’s why it’s absolutely necessary to tweak your website performance in order to have it running as fast as possible.

It’s funny because so many website owners believe that adding the latest bells and whistles are what customers really want.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with cool features like moving backgrounds and parallax web scrolling.

But if it’s going to sacrifice a visitor’s time by making them wait an extra 10 seconds for the page to load, you can bet potential readers will bounce from your website faster than a supersonic jet doing Mach 5.

In an effort to create an efficient and fast user experience for everyone visiting your website, please enhance your site using the following strategies.

1. Image Size Reduction

Based on data discovered on HTTP archive, the bulk of the page weight of a website – 61% – on a desktop computer comes from images.

To help reduce this additional page weight, and make your website load faster, it’s recommended that you appropriately size images to help improve your overall website performance.

Another option is to begin using new image formats like JPEG XR or WebP. These new formats can help you keep higher image quality and still lower image weight by 20% to 50%.

2. Cache is King

This term shouldn’t be new to you. Caching is a way to temporarily store your webpages to help improve loading performance while reducing bandwidth.

When somebody arrives at your website, they will see the last cached version of it unless you had made changes to the site prior to your visit.

By doing this, things become a lot faster and you’ll save serious server time. To help improve user performance and speed up your website, always make sure this feature is enabled at all times.

3. Are You Using a Content Delivery Network?

This is an excellent way to speed up user experience. When you use a content delivery network (CDN), your overall performance will improve because this method of content delivery will have your site loading on Web servers that are closer to the physical location of the website visitor.

So, you can deliver CSS, JavaScript, images, static website files, and more through the CDN to speed up the overall user experience.

The shorter the proximity to the content delivery network, the quicker the website will be for the user.

4. Have Your Website Coded for Speed and Mobile First Quality

have your website coded for speed and mobile first qualityThe mobile web is dominating the internet right now, so it’s absolutely imperative to code your website so that it is mobile first.

The paradigm has completely shifted at this point.

In the not-too-distant past, we focused on making desktop websites more responsive on mobile devices. It’s time to switch this thinking and code for mobile first.

With this strategy, it’s recommended that you build your website for the mobile web and then work toward enhancing the experience for users on desktops and tablets.

By doing this, the number of dependencies will be reduced and the overall user experience will be much quicker this way.

To help improve application performance, consider APM tools from Stackify.

Conclusion

Speeding up website load times is one of the best things you can do for user experience. And if you’re selling products and services on your site, this will help increase conversions and lower your bounce rate.