One of the ranking factors that affect your SEO is website performance. Google prefers websites that load fast and properly over those that load with problems.
Apart from affecting your website’s ranking negatively, a slow website also presents lots of other problems. According to recent studies, people leave websites that load for more than 3 seconds. Even if you do get leads on customers, it’s very likely that they won’t push through with visiting your website at all.
To take care of performance issues, consider these tips.
1. Poor Mobile Design
A majority of the people that visit your website are doing so using their mobile devices. The trend is that more and more people are using smartphones and tablets each year.
Your website needs to be mobile-friendly. This means aside from having assets that are smaller, the mobile version of your website should at the very least be very easy to browse through on a smaller screen.
The general rule of thumb is to make sure that the contents on your website can be viewable or browsable with just one hand.
2. Unoptimized Images/videos
One of the most common reasons why your website is performing poorly is because of unoptimized images.
For starters, you don’t want to upload anything on your website that’s more than 1MB. Anything beyond that is a cause for your website to start slowing down. It’s not a good idea to find an image and then compress it down to a smaller file size. Instead, look for images that are already of the appropriate size and resolution.
If you have videos on your website and they are too high a resolution, it will take time for the page to load completely. Instead of sacrificing the quality of the video just to get it to run more smoothly, choose to embed videos on your website through YouTube instead.
3. Too Many Ads
It can be tempting to put in lots of ads on your website because it’s extra revenue after all. However, more ads mean that there are more assets to be loaded on your website as well. It can also make your website look more spam than authoritative.
Pick the ads that you put on your website as well. Make sure that their ad copies are simple. As much as possible, the ad banners should just be images instead of videos.
AVOID VIDEO ADS that play automatically as this is a big turn-off to most web users.
To increase the chances of having your web visitors click through the ads, only choose ads from businesses that are related to your niche so that there’s already a vested interest.
Ads can be helpful but too many of them are going to do more harm than good for your business.
4. Unclean Code
A website’s backend should be thorough and clean too. The code on your website should at the very least, not have any white spaces for starters.
When it comes to the code, make sure that each line is as efficient as possible. A common mistake that people make is that their code is unnecessarily long. Having an expert web developer go through and optimize the code can greatly improve your website.
5. Too Much Flash
Flash allows you to add more interactivity to your website. However, it’s a double-edged sword that also results in performance problems for your website too.
You should remove Flash from your website or have it eliminated completely. While your website will be plainer in doing so, you can still at least benefit by ensuring that your platform is performing at its best at all times.
6. JavaScript Problems
Like Flash, JavaScript plugins can make your website more dynamic. If you don’t use JavaScript properly however, it can also cripple your website’s page load speed as well. Without proper codes, JavaScript takes longer to load and execute as well.
Problems with Flash and JavaScript aren’t that common reasons for a website’s poor performance but when the problems are there, they cause the most impact as well.
Having a professional web developer optimize all of your Flash and Javascript content is vital to improve website performance.
Running your website through an audit is one of the best ways to pinpoint performance problems. Acting on these problems fast will make it easier for your audience to browse through your website. Additionally, you can increase your rankings on search engines as well.
A good-performing website is vital for every business owner or hobbyist. As such, you should come to us for help if you feel like your website could be better.