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User or customer experience is vital to company success these days. If you operate an online business and own a website, you’ll have to provide consumers with the most exceptional experience possible or risk losing a lot of traffic.
The fact is that online consumers have many choices regarding online purchases. As a result, they tend to be picky. Therefore, they’re not only focused on the quantity or quality of your products and services but primarily on the experience you can provide them with.
How your website looks and performs can affect the customer experience in many ways. So, to attract and retain more customers, you’ll have to boost your website’s performance. Here are a few actionable steps that will help you do that.
1. Improve website speed
Website speed and page loading time are arguably the most critical factors in website performance. Nobody wants to spend time on a website that takes too long to load, especially consumers who go to a website to browse products and eventually make purchases.
If a consumer encounters a sluggish website, they will leave immediately. Moreover, they will never return and quickly spread the word about their bad experience on your site. You want to avoid such scenarios at all costs.
Most consumers are so impatient that they’ll become outraged if your website takes only a second too long to load its content. That one-second delay can result in a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, an 11% decrease in page views, and a 7% decrease in conversion rate.
2. Choose the right web hosting provider
Your website’s performance largely depends on your hosting provider. A hosting service allocates space for your website on the Internet. They give you server space, web address, and domain while running your website.
You can choose from various types of web hosting, and each solution will affect website performance somehow. For example, if you have a WordPress website, you can choose a self-hosting option or one that includes web hosting.
Either way, web hosting is an investment, and you have to choose wisely if you want good website performance. That said, if you go for a shared hosting feature, for instance, you should know that this model is cheaper, but you also share server resources with other websites, so don’t expect peak performance.
3. Optimize your website for mobile
An essential part of your website performance is mobile-friendliness. Nowadays, most online consumers use mobile devices to browse the Internet. That said, your website must be mobile-friendly. Today, mobile traffic has vastly increased globally, and it will continue to do so in the future.
Therefore, your top priority should be catering to mobile user expectations and needs. The main reason is that even search engines like Google favor mobile-friendly websites. You should strongly consider implementing a responsive design.
You can consult a responsive web design company to help you do everything correctly. Once you have a responsive design, your website will be optimized for mobile based on speed, content, page layout, navigation, and more.
4. Minify the code
Every website uses various resources to display visual elements correctly. The more elements you have on your pages, the more it takes to download them all. In other words, whenever someone accesses your website, they request an HTTP for each element, such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc.
You must minify and combine the code to reduce these elements and improve page loading time. If you know a thing or two about web development, you can do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.
In addition, if you’re running a WordPress website, you can use various plug-ins to polish your code. Minimizing your website code and combining elements makes it faster and more seamless for visitors to load and view your pages’ content.
5. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A content delivery or distribution network, CDN in short, is a group of servers located worldwide. It aims to quickly transfer assets such as HTML pages, JavaScript files, images, videos, and stylesheets across various locations.
That means that when someone from Europe, for instance, accesses your website hosted in the US, they don’t have to request assets directly to your hosting server. Instead, they can access those assets from a server closest to them.
This dramatically reduces latency and page loading time, thus improving your website performance and user experience simultaneously. Whether you have a WP website or otherwise, it’s recommended that you opt for a CDN service to speed things up.
6. Reduce the number of plug-ins
This one is for all of you who have a WordPress-powered website. Of course, WP’s beauty is that it’s also a CMS (Content Management System). That means you have much control when managing content and polishing your website’s aesthetics.
You can pretty much find the correct plug-in for anything you need. However, as helpful as plug-ins are, many third-party software doesn’t match your website’s code. This can result in errors and crashes, but in most cases, it will bloat your site and drastically slow it down.
Therefore, eliminate excess plug-ins, especially ones you don’t need or use anymore. You should use only the plug-ins you need, and if you want to use other plug-ins that may prove practical or convenient for your WP website, make sure you research them a bit first.
7. Leverage website caching
A lot of website visitors will frequent your site now and then. Every time they revisit, they must send requests and load your page again. As you can imagine, this can slow things down, which is something you want to avoid.
That’s why you should enable and leverage website caching. This saves the current version of your website until it’s updated. You present the cached version to users every time they visit you, so your pages don’t have to be rendered again.
You can set up website caching yourself or use a plug-in to do it for you if you have a WP website. The important thing is that cached websites don’t have to send database requests every time a user visits your website.
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8. Resize website elements
The size of some elements on your website can drastically reduce its performance. The most common elements in question are images. Everyone likes high-quality, high-resolution images, and consumers love seeing those on your website.
However, the better the image’s quality, the larger its size, the more resources it will use, and the longer it will take to load. Fortunately, you can reduce the size without sacrificing image quality too much or at all.
For example, you can use various tools to compress high-quality images without compromising quality. This will reduce their size drastically, allowing them to load much faster. If you have a responsive design, images will adjust based on the user’s screen properties. On account of that, you should make sure that you hire an agency that resizes website elements properly while building a new website.
9. Update your website regularly
If there’s one thing that can utterly ruin website performance, it’s obsolete software. Obsolete doesn’t necessarily mean software that was in use two decades ago. Missing one or two essential updates can make your website obsolete in terms of performance.
That’s why regular updates are vital for website performance and functionality. This is especially true for WP websites. Not updating your WP website can lead to many complications, ranging from slow performance to crashes.
Your website visitors will not appreciate it, and you will not enjoy the downtime until everything is fixed. That said, WP is an open-source project, which means regular updates are mandatory. Your responsibility is to ensure that your themes, plug-ins, and entire WP site are up to date.
Website performance depends on many factors these days. What matters is that your website visitors, customers, or clients will notice something is wrong. And if something is wrong, they won’t stick around until you fix the issues. That’s why you must continuously monitor your website and do everything you can to boost its performance. If you boost it even slightly, it can still make a massive difference in user experience.