Website performance is an important, but often overlooked, aspect of a website. Not every visitor to your site will have a fast and reliable connection. Many of those visitors will be on connections with variable connection speeds, a reality in today’s increasingly mobile-centric world of web design. Other visitors may be in areas or countries where connection speeds are simply slow to begin with.
Even if a person has lightning fast Internet speeds, a website that loads quickly will benefit them as well. After all, no one has ever said “this website loaded too fast for me!”
Taking a website’s performance seriously is an important step in ensuring the overall success of that website. Let’s look at some of the tools that can be used to evaluate a site’s performance, as well as some of the culprits which may be negatively impacting that performance.
Evaluation Tools
Knowing how your site is working currently is the first step to improving performance. Here are some helpful tools that you can use to assess your website:
- Pingdom Tools Website Speed Test – this site will evaluate the download size and speed of a site and show you all the resources (images, CSS, Javascript, etc) that the site needs to render properly
- What Does My Site Cost? –this site puts a dollar amount to the data download on your website and shows you what the cost would be in various countries throughout the world. If your site has an international audience, this can be especially helpful
- Webpage Test – this helpful site provides you with a wealth of information and tips for how you can improve a site’s performance.
Once you’ve evaluated a site, you can look at the areas of that site that could use improvement from a performance/download size perspective.
Images
The average weight of a website has climbed to nearly 2MB and the bulk of that size is due to images. Simply addressing the size of images on a website is one way that you can significantly reduce the download size of that site’s pages.
To ensure that images are as small, file size wise, as possible, raster images (JPGs, GIFs, and PNGs) should be optimized for web delivery. The goal is to reduce the file size as much as possible while still delivering nice looking images. New image formats, like SVG and WebP, can also be explored as ways to lower the overall weight of a page’s images.
Fonts
With web fonts, designers have access to wide range of typefaces that can be used reliably on the websites they design and develop. This is awesome from a design variety standpoint, but it can be step in the wrong direction for webpage loading time. Every time you use a new web font on a site, that font needs to be retrieved from the server and loaded on the page (unlike system fonts that are loaded directly from a person’s computer). Loading multiple fonts for a page can definitely impact download speed.
Animation
Animated effects, like a slideshow-like “carousel” display on a website’s homepage, can add some nice visual WOW factor to a site, but it will do so at the expense of download time (remember, every one of those large images needs to be loaded onto the page, along with the Javascript needed to run the animation effects).
From a download performance perspective, just one image/message on your homepage’s billboard area is preferable to an animated carousel. Additionally, research conducted on the use of these animated carousels shows they are less than effective anyway, so by removing that effect, you can often improve download speed without any negative impact on the site as a whole.
Web Hosting
The elements of your webpages are not the only factor that impacts performance. Your website hosting provider also plays a role in this equation. By using the evaluation tools linked to earlier in this article, you can discover some suggestions that apply to your website hosting settings. Share those findings with that provider to see what they can do on their end to improve your site’s performance from the server level.
In Summary
A website that loads fast is a wonderful thing. This is increasingly important as more people use mobile devices to access websites. An important part of your job as a web professional is to ensure that your websites take performance seriously and are ready to do their part in making sure the pages load quiclly for all users, regardless of device or connection speeds.
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