Website Performance

/ / Published in Website design, WordPress
Website Performance

6 Tips to Help Improve your Website’s Performance

You’ve hired a developer to develop your website and s/he did a great job in transforming your vision into a functional platform. Now, you need to make sure that your website works on all devices on different browsers, and you need to make sure that your website contains the necessary files needed for it to perform well. To do so, you need to ask your developer these questions before the site is uploaded onto your server:

  1. Is the website responsive on all devices, and across all screens on different platforms?
  2. What is the performance level of the website on google and pingdom?
  3. Does the website include an .htaccess file?
  4. Does the website include a robot.txt file?
  5. Is there a sitemap or .xml site map for the website?
  6. Is the website indexed in different search engines?
  7. Check pagespeed insight

  1.  Is the website responsive on all devices, and across all screens on different platforms?

Test your website on different device resolutions i.e Mobile, Tablet, Desktop, laptop and across all sizes such as, 10″ Netbook (1024 x 600) 12″ Netbook (1024 x 768) 13″ Notebook (1280 x 768) Notebooks with touch (1280 x 950) 15″ Notebook (1366 x 768) 19″ Desktop (1440x 900) 20″ Desktop (1600 x 900) 22″ Desktop, 13″ MacBooks (1680 x 1050). You might even want to check the same screen sizes in these devices.

  1. What is the performance level of the website on Google and pingdom?

Web Performance aligns with website design. If the design looks good however, it doesn’t mean that the website is performing well. Page speed plays a big role in website optimization and how fast your website is rendering. A slow rendering website might decrease your conversion rate based to a high bounce-rate of the traffic driven to your website, while a website which loads in less than 0.3 seconds is statistically proven to increase conversion rates and sales. To check on your website performance, use one of these free website speed test checkers to analyze the load speed of your websites, and learn how to make them faster. Tools like PageSpeed Insights provide you with tools on how to make your web pages load faster on all devices. You can also check Pigdom and gtmetrix or kissmetrics, find out which one works best for you and start optimizing your site accordingly.

  1. Does the website include an .htaccess file?

What is .htaccess file?

.htaccess is a configuration file for use on web servers running the Apache Web Server software. When a .htaccess file is placed in a directory, it is loaded via the Apache Web Server, and then the .htaccess file is detected and executed by the Apache Web Server software.

WordPress uses this file to manipulate how Apache serves files from its root directory and subdirectories. WordPress modifies this file to be able to handle permalinks. This page may be used to restore a corrupted .htaccess file, and to leverage browsing cache.

  1. Does the website include a robot.txt file?

Whats is .htaccess file?

Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots like Google, Bing and Yahoo) how to crawl pages on their website. To learn more on how your robot.txt file affects your search engine, check search console help on google for more details.

  1. Will your developer provide a sitemap or .xml Site map for the website?

What is .Xml Site map?

An XML sitemap contains all important pages of a site to help Google determine the structure of it. You want Google to crawl every important page of your website. That won’t happen if the pages don’t have any internal links to them, because it makes them hard to find. You can ask your developer to generate a .Xml Sitemap for your site, or you can generate one using a plugin if you have a CMS based website such as word-press.

  1. Is the website indexed in different search engines?

After you’ve made sure that all the above-mentioned components are functioning well, now you have to submit the sitemap to be indexed in different Search engines. If your developer does not provide this service, you can simply do it yourself by visiting Google webmaster tools under your Google business account, and submit and index the .xml site map. You can repeat this process with the search engines that you want your website to be indexed on. Another option than Google is Bing Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Webmaster Tools, along with 100 other search engines that you can find online which might be popular in other countries..

  1. Check PageSpeed Insights (New)

  • Avoid multiple page redirects
  • Properly size images
  • Defer unused CSS
  • Minify CSS
  • Minify JavaScript
  • Efficiently encode images
  • Enable text compression
  • Preload key requests
  • Avoid enormous network payloads
  • Defer offscreen images
  • Reduce server response times (TTFB)
  • Eliminate render-blocking resources
  • Use video formats for animated content
  • Preconnect to required origins
  • Serve images in next-gen formats
  • Ensure text remains visible during webfont load
  • Minimize main-thread work
  • Reduce JavaScript execution time
  • Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy
  • Avoid an excessive DOM size
  • Minimize Critical Requests Depth
  • Measure performance

    • Wondering what more you can do to, check my Article on 100 things to do which will improve your website

    Feel free to share
    Hamza Shatela is a front-end designer and online business developer with over a decade of digital marketing experience. As the founder of Slide Sigma, Hamza has worked with a series of professionals within the Medical, Financial, Non-Profit, Wedding and Entertainment industries.

    What you can read next

    WordPress Sidebar Tips To Increase Page Results
    WordPress Sidebar Tips To Increase Page Results
    Multisites WordPress
    How to Install Multisite on WordPress
    Directory WordPress Themes
    Best Directory WordPress Themes