5 Things To Recheck Before Your Website Performance Sinks

by JONATHAN PAUL Jonathan Paul working at PHPProgrammers, a leading

This article attempts to explain how website owners can boost the performance of their websites considering some of the vital aspects of the web app’s backend functionality.

The performance of the web application or website is something that remains the key priority of website owners, especially in this hyper-competitive world. Your website is worthy of getting more traffic for your business when it runs smoothly and can brilliantly handle all the peaks of a website load. But, how to ensure that your website has that potential for that? Even when your website seems flawless in its different aspects, you need to recheck and reconsider each and every prior backend aspects to ensure it can load with fast speed and provide a hassle-free experience.

Given below the top 5 crucial things that you need to ensure for your website if you want it to perform consistently.

Size of image files

The first rule for website speed optimisation is the use of compressed images, videos and other multimedia files which consumers lesser bytes. Ideally, the images irrespective of their sizes are loaded and then resized or compressed as per the computing capacities and this takes time i.e. the loading time. So, you need to check and resize the image files and keep them within desired dimensions in advance for optimised loading time.

Placing of files

Check whether the CSS stylesheets are optimally placed. The optimal way is to place them at top of the web page i.e. at the header and the scripts should be placed at the bottom. This is necessary because the CSS files load progressively but the scripts check the parallel loading.

Caching is enabled

This point is included in every website optimisation checklist that shows how crucial it is. Fortunately, there are enough tools to help you find it out like Varnish. Caches can save up CPU cycles giving your website some extra speed. Caching deliberately creates a temporary storage for all the web pages which reduces the bandwidth. Every time a visitor arrives, the cached version serves up, letting the site to load faster. So, be sure caching is enabled.

Number of HTTP requests

HTTPs requests are the response protocols that a web browser fetches files (CSS, JS library references, images) every time from a server when a visitor enters. Hence, a lesser number of HTTP requests will take less time in fetching and reduces loading time. So, make sure your website is running will very less and only the relevant HTTP requests.

Hosting plan

After going through all the above aspects of the checklist, review the hosting plan. Shared hosting and dedicated hosting both have different impacts on a site’s performance. While the former involves sharing the server space with hundreds of other sites, the latter provides your site with the sole access to the server. Naturally, the first option will have more impact on the site’s speed and so it is better to alter the hosting type from the service provider.

Businesses that want to have better visibility i.e. the top position in search results severely needs to go by this checklist of factors. It’s always detrimental for a website if the users have to wait for more than 5-7 seconds to access it properly. Clearly, it raises your site’s bounce rate causing it to lose its position in the search results. So, before time runs out, check on your website and take assistance from an adept PHP developer to fix up things.

Jonathan Paul is a senior CakePHP programmer in Sydney who works at PHPProgrammers, a trusted web development company in Australia with expertise in a number of PHP frameworks including Laravel, CakePHP and CodeIgniter. He has the knack to find out new concepts, theories and tricks for website optimisation and make others in industry and businesses aware of them.