Website performance optimization -
In this article, we will give you recommendations about how to improve your website performance and page load time. Importance of website speed optimization Page load time is a web performance metric that shows the time needed for a page to show on the user screen.
Website conversion is an important factor in your business success, which means getting your visitors to do what you want them to do. For instance, they will buy your product, subscribe to newsletters campaigns, register for a webinar, or download a guide. The faster the page loads, the higher conversion rates it'll have.
According to the Hubspot research , 1 second delay means 7 percent reduction in conversions. The load time of your website also influences how easily users can find your website. Website speed is one of the factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking sites. A low performing website has a poor user experience and as a result gains less promotion in search results.
Since December , the Google search engine has started ranking also based on mobile versions of pages, even for desktop searches. Website usability like website page speed, load time, and website responsiveness to user requests directly impacts customer loyalty. The better your website performs, the more satisfied a user will be.
A great user experience is a way for building a large customer base and a strong brand. Ways to assess your website speed Before starting your website speed optimization you should determine your current loading time and define what slows your site down.
Then you should set your website performance goals. The recommendation for page load time in is to be under 3 seconds. According to the Google research on the average mobile speed across industry sectors, just a fraction of websites is close to their recommended speed.
US mobile average speed index So, if you optimize your website speed to an acceptable level, you will get a significant ranking advantage over competitors. The ways of website speed optimization listed in this article are very different and sometimes the solution to one problem can have the negative impact on another aspect of your site.
There are several performance evaluation tools that are worth trying: Google Pagespeed Insights is a free tool from Google that runs a performance test on your site and provides recommendations on how to increase performance.
It works for both desktop and mobile versions. Pingdom is also a great tool for website speed testing with a number of useful features. Pingdom also provides the apps for website speed testing for Android and iOS. It has both free and professional paid monitoring plans.
YSlow also provides recommendations on how to improve the performance of the page, draws statistics, and summarizes all components.
Performance Budget Calculator is a free tool that helps figure out what type of content you can use to keep your site running optimally.
Performance budget calculator Guidelines to speed up your website Once you have tested the speed of your website, you can start optimizing it. There are a lot of different ways to make your website work faster and we created the list of the most effective ones. Use a Content Delivery Network CDN A content delivery network is a set of web servers distributed across various geographical locations that provide web content to end users with regard to their location.
When you host the website on a single server, all users requests are sent to the same hardware. For this reason, the time needed to process each request increases. On top of that, the load time increases when users are physically far from the server. With CDN, user requests are redirected to the nearest server.
As a result, the content is delivered to a user quicker and a website works faster. This is a rather expensive, but quite effective way to optimize the load time. Move your website to a better host There are three possible types of hosting: Shared hosting Virtual Private Servers VPS hosting Dedicated server The most popular type of hosting that is used all over the world is sharing hosting.
With shared hosting, you share CPU, disk space, and RAM with other sites that also use this server. Virtual Private Servers and dedicated servers are much faster.
VPS uses multiple servers for content distribution. If your website has the average traffic or you have the eCommerce site with traffic spikes in some periods, VPS will be the optimal solution for you. The most expensive hosting option is to use a dedicated server which can be your own physical server.
In this case, you pay a server rent and hire a system administrator to maintain it. Another approach is to rent dedicated cloud resource from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, or other public cloud provider.
Both approaches can also be combined into a hybrid cloud that we discussed recently. With dedicated servers, all resources belong only to you and you get the full control of it.
Cloud infrastructures can also add unlimited and on-demand scalability under a number of packages. Serverless architecture is yet another option that removes maintenance and server set up procedures altogether. Consider reading our separate article covering serverless architecture specifics and benefits.
Optimize the size of images on your website Everyone loves eye-catching images. In the case of successful eCommerce sites, images are the vital part.
A lot of photos, images, graphics on your product pages improve engagement. The negative side of the image use is that they are usually large files that slow down a website. The best way to reduce the image size without compromising its quality is to compress images using such tools as ImageOptim , JPEGmini , or Kraken.
The procedure may take a bit of time but it's worth it. Reduce the number of plugins Plugins are common components of each website.
They add specific features suggested by third parties. Unfortunately, the more plugins are installed, the more resources are needed to run them. As a result, the website works slower and also security issues can appear. As time passes, the number of plugins grows, while some of them may not be used anymore.
We recommend checking out all the plugins you have installed and deleting unnecessary ones. First, run the performance tests on your page to find out which plugins are slowing down your website. Not only does the website speed depend on the number of installed plugins but also on their quality.
Try to avoid plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles or generate a lot of database queries. The best solution is to keep only the necessary ones and ensure that they are kept up to date. Minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files If your website contains a lot of JavaScript and CSS files, it leads to a large number of HTTP requests when your website visitors want to access particular files.
If you reduce the number of JavaScript and CSS files this will undoubtedly speed up your website. Try to group all JavaScript into one and also do so with all CSS files. This will reduce the overall number of HTTP requests.
There are a lot of tools to minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files quickly. For instance, you can use WillPeavy , Script Minifier , or Grunt tools. Use website caching In case there are a lot of users accessing the page at one time servers work slowly and need more time to deliver the web page to each user.
Caching is the process of storing the current version of your website on the hosting and presenting this version until your website is updated. Hotjar integrates with Optimizely and other experimentation tools to automatically detect when your site visitors interact with an experiment control or variation page.
You can filter your Hotjar session recordings and user feedback by Optimizely experiment ID to see how visitors click, move, and scroll on each version, and how they respond to it. What it is: GTmetrix is a web page speed tool. How to use it: enter any URL and click 'Test your site' for a basic speed test.
Click the drop-down on each recommendation to learn how to make your page load faster. What it is: WAVE is a web accessibility evaluation tool. What you can optimize: find accessibility issues like missing alt text, small text size, and contrast errors that make your content inaccessible to screen readers.
How to use it: enter any URL and click through the icon-coded errors to see what to change and learn why improved accessibility is important.
Think of it like one big optimization ecosystem: if you improve your website speed, you also impact your SEO, UX, and CRO efforts. A slow website can drive users away and hurt search rankings. We collaborated with HubSpot Academy on their free Website Optimization course. SEO helps you get more free website traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.
There are many different types of SEO tools that help you do everything from optimizing the structure of your web pages to tracking how you rank for certain keywords. These include. Rank tracking tools to measure and compare search traffic , and tell you how your site ranks in the search engine results pages SERPs for target keywords.
Video SEO tools to optimize your videos to rank highly on video search engines like YouTube. You can use specialist SEO tools that only do one thing for example, Screaming Frog is a dedicated technical SEO tool , and all-in-one SEO tools, like Ahrefs, which do a little of everything.
Bing Webmaster Tools. Google Trends. Great UX keeps visitors happy and reduces friction on your site , ultimately leading to better conversions and increased revenue.
UX optimization tools won't magically improve user experience, but usability testing will help you understand user behavior and diagnose problems so you can optimize pages and give people what they need to keep browsing and buying from your site.
UX tools help with each step of the page optimization journey, from spotting where users get stuck to conducting user research. Adobe Analytics.
When done right, CRO increases the number of website visitors that become customers or perform any desired action on your site.
Traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics. Behavior analytics software tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and on-site surveys. Google Analytics. More people browse websites on mobile than desktop, so mobile-first optimization can help you ensure people view your site correctly on phones and tablets.
Web elements like pop-ups, image-heavy pages, and tiny text can make your site difficult to navigate on mobile. If you're using Hotjar, for example, your dashboard gives you an at-a-glance breakdown of your site visitors' devices. Mobile-Friendly Test. An accessible website is easy for everyone to use—which is a win-win for you and your visitors: great UX for them and more happy customers for you.
Accessibility tools show you how your landing pages appear on a screen reader or to people with various impairments for example, different types of colorblindness.
These tools also provide optimization suggestions to make your website more inclusive. Check My Colours. Functional Accessibility Evaluator. And there are thousands more where those came from. Enter session recordings , which help you understand the experiences of individual users on your site.
Using recordings, watch how real people get stuck and progress through your funnel, and see what they do right before they convert or leave. But truly being on the same page as your users doesn't stop at seeing what they do; it also involves hearing what they have to say, in their own words.
Combine insights from surveys , interviews , and user feedback tools with session recordings for a complete understanding of what users say and what they do. Hotjar enables you to effortlessly move between user behavior insights from all of these tools for a holistic understanding of your site's user experience.
Get user feedback sent to a dedicated Microsoft Teams or Slack channel to hear what users say as they say it.
Then, in a single click, view a recording of the user who left the response to see the actions that prompted their feedback. Send an exit-intent survey to users who drop off at key places in your funnel to understand what you could do differently to make them stay.
Follow up with a interview hosted in Hotjar Engage to get more detailed insights and optimization ideas. View heatmaps of low-converting pages for an aggregate view of user behavior.
When you spot head-scratching user activity, like scrolling that stops before your first call-to-action button, jump into session recordings to understand why users didn't make it further down the page.
Once you know how users navigate your website and what they expect from it, you can develop an optimization strategy that delivers exactly what they need. Website optimization is a continuous process of improvement to your pages to help them load faster, rank for keywords, increase conversions, be more accessible, and provide better UX to visitors.
Web optimization works by using tools to measure and track opportunities for improvement and provide insight into the changes you can make to grow your site. Website optimization is important because it helps you increase website traffic, overtake the competition, and give a great experience to your users and customers.
Put simply, an optimized website will ultimately help you grow your business and increase revenue. Website optimization tools help you make sense of performance and behavior data about your website, and create a roadmap for improving different elements of your site, like:.
Begin with Google Search Console , then choose one of the popular all-in-one SEO tools: Ahrefs and Moz are both great beginner-friendly SEO tools with plenty of tutorials, videos, and how-to guides to get you started. Hotjar Logo. Contact Sales. Sign in. Get started free. Website optimization benefits Website optimization roadmap Website optimization questions Website optimization techniques Website optimization tests Website optimization checklist Web optimization tools.
Summary Achieving iterative growth through continuous optimization is crucial for any business with an online presence. Try Hotjar today. Top 7 free website optimization tools to try right now For a list of our top picks for free tools, keep reading.
PageSpeed Insights What it is: created by Google, PageSpeed Insights is a simple, free website speed checker What you can optimize: website page speed, desktop website performance, and mobile page speed How to use it: enter any URL and click 'Analyze'. Hotjar What it is: Hotjar that's us!
Your one-stop shop for website optimization insights Hotjar's tools and features work in harmony to give you customer-centric insights at the quantitative and qualitative level, with quick and easy ways to jump between the two.
Google Search Console GSC What it is: Search Console is a free search optimization tool from Google What you can optimize: measure SEO performance, view keyword impressions, and clicks, see your backlinks, and check for crawling and speed errors How to use it: sign in with your Google account, verify site ownership, and wait for data to be collected 4.
Screaming Frog What it is: Screaming Frog is website crawling software for PC, Mac, or Linux What you can optimize: on-page and technical SEO—find broken links, check HTML and XML sitemaps, find duplicate content, check redirects, and analyze page titles and meta descriptions How to use it: download Screaming Frog and enter a URL or sitemap to start crawling 5.
A session recording of a user browsing the Hotjar homepage, captured using Hotjar Recordings.
Hotjar now speaks your language. Try Hotjar in Website performance optimization. Back to guides. Iterating perdormance and better versions of performande website as user performqnce and the Blood sugar management landscape evolve is the most Visceral fat and inflammation way to keep attracting more visitors and conversions. Achieving iterative growth through continuous optimization is crucial for any business with an online presence. If you're at the early stages of your website optimization journey, consider starting out with these seven free tools and growing your stack as you go:. PageSpeed Insights to stay on top of and improve your website speed. Make the Web Faster. Discover tools and information to help optiization build otpimization websites. Analyze with Perfprmance Insights Get Colorful vegetable platters PageSpeed score Wensite use Mindful nourishment suggestions to make your web site faster through our online tool. Run Insights Read docs. Speed up with the PageSpeed Modules Run the open source PageSpeed Modules on your Apache or Nginx server to automatically rewrite and optimize resources on your web site. Learn more about the PageSpeed Modules.
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