4 Essential Tips to maintain Website Performance [Beginners Guide]

If you've been experiencing poor website performance lately and have found that your pages are slow to load, are losing website traffic or just don't work in general (which would be really bad), you could benefit from some website performance optimisation!

Page speed and overall website performance are essential to ensuring that you maintain a high ranking in the search engine, continue to drive leads and sales and provide an overall excellent experience for your site users.

In this post, I'll teach you some of the most essential tips to improve your website's performance and ensure that you remain at the top of your game!

Let's dive right in!

What makes a website run slow?

If your website is running slow, or has reduced performance, it can be caused by a number of things, it's more than likely going to be caused though by unoptimised images, but that's not all...

Here's just a few reasons why your website might be running slow right now:

• Unoptimised (uncompressed) images and visuals
• Non-minified CSS and JS files
• Non-minified HTML (the markup on the web page)
• Poor server resource
• A large number of redirects

Of course, these are just a few reasons as to why your website might be running slowly, now, let's go into a little more detail with how you can increase page speed on your site.

Tips to maintain website performance

We've covered some of the reasons that make a website slow, now let's go over some of the things that you can implementto boost website performance and overall page speed...

Minify assets such as CSS, HTML and JS

Undoubtedly if you've just started your website, or have had your website for a long time you've probably collected a lot of images, style files and files that create functionality on your site like JS (JavaScript)

Unfortunately, all of these assets are actually one of the root causes of poor page speed and poor performance overall.

Why?

Because these three things are what make up your website, and by minifying them you can gain back a fair amount of performance.

What is website minification?

Website minification, and minification of the assets on your site is where you take all of your lines of code (in the case of HTML markup and JS) and remove all of the whitespace, creating one long line of code rather than multiple lines.

By removing whitespace from the code, you're gaining back bytes of data, and when you multiply this thousands of times for all of the code on your site, it can add up to a fair amount!

There are tools online that can help you minify assets such as CSS Compressor to minify your CSS, and the HTML dirty markup website which can help clean up your HTML.

If you're a WordPress user, then the above resources likely aren't going to help you that much, so here's a popular article that covers some excellent choices for WordPress minification.

Optimise your images - seriously!

Images and other visuals on a website are what make up the visual aspect of any site, and appeal to most users.

However, your images could be oversized causing you to have a drop in website page speed and performance...

Let's take a look at an example here...

If you've got an image that has a resolution of 1920x1280, that's a large image, and your web page likely has a container that's around 992 pixels wide...

In this case, your 1920 pixel wide image is twice as wide as the page that's displaying the image.

In this case, you're going to want to resize the image in a tool like Adobe Photoshop in order to free up some space.

After this, you're going to want to reduce the overall size of the image in terms of image compression

The BEST tool or image compression - PNG and JPEG

In order to compress your images, whether that be for a WordPress website, or a bespoke site, you're going to need a tool to compress them, I highly recommend the tool over at TinyPNG as it's a free tool and can compress up to 20 images, 5mb each!

• Compresses up to 20 images at 5mb each
• FREE to use in the browser
• Offers a Photoshop plugin for advanced users

If you compress images in combination with resizing them correctly, you're going to for sure improve and maintain website performance without a doubt.

Check server resources

The server that your website lives in is likely going to be shared hosting, shared web hosting. If this is the case, the server resources allocated for your website are shared amongst other websites.

This means that the amount of processing power, storage and memory allocated for your site is going to be affected.

We've got a few blog articles on the domain monitor blog outlining everything that you need to know about web hosting.

If you're just starting out with your website, I'd recommend getting started with a Digital Ocean droplet, they're fast, easy to set up and start from just $5 per month on their shared hosting!

Choose the right web hosting for your website

When choosing website hosting, it can often be all too easy to go with the cheapest, or the most inexpensive option.

However, if you're going to do this, you're likely going to experience poor website performance through lack of insufficient server resources as mentioned in our above point.

I'd recommend taking into account the following when choosing the right web hosting:

• Ensure sufficient website resources such as CPU, RAM and storage
• Check that there's excellent customer support
• Find out how long the hosting provider has been around for

How can I monitor my website performance?

Okay, so monitoring website performance isn't going to be straight forward unless you have a website monitoring tool.

Choosing the best website monitoring tool for your needs and budget is going to be essential to ensuring that you're able to monitor your site's performance with ease.

When looking for a website monitoring tool for observing website performance, ensure to check for the following:

• SSL expiration checking
• Domain expiry checking
• Core website uptime monitoring

Most tools will have all of these features built in, and likely more, but keeping a check on whether the tool you're planning on going for has this is vital.

Conclusion

Ensuring that you're implementing some of these essential tips to maintaining website performance TODAY will set your site up for success, and business success for the future.

Most of your website visitors might leave your site if it's not performing up to the standard they're expecting, and if this is the case, you could be losing out!

If you liked this blog post, and would like more content like this, feel free to share this article with your friends and family, or if you know of anyone who could benefit from this content, please feel free to point them to this article!

At the domain monitor, we're always looking to improve and provide helpful content for everyone in the domain and website space.