The Ultimate Guide to Website Performance

More people than ever before use the internet to make decisions about where they spend their money, visit a company’s website before making a purchase, and buy products online. As such, it’s important that your website is performing well and that user experience (UX) is maximized. For businesses hoping to improve their website performance, here’s a quick overview of how website performance is defined, why it matters, how website performance can be improved, and how our digital marketing professionals at NUVEW can help–

What Is Website Performance?

In a very broad sense, website performance might include metrics like bounce rate (how many users leave a page before taking an action) and conversion rate (how many users become customers). But in its most basic and fundamental sense, website performance really just refers to how quickly a page loads and displays on a web browser. This speed then affects the other metrics mentioned above. 

Does It Really Matter?

Most brands assume that if their webpage is opening and displaying faster than the speed at which a turtle moves, all is fine and good. But this isn’t necessarily true–website performance, or website speed, definitely matters. Poor load and display time can have a direct negative impact on UX. When users have a bad experience, your conversion rate is lower, your bounce rate is higher, you retain fewer customers, and your sales go down. This is not what any business is aiming for.

Conversely, by improving website performance, chances are high that all of these other markers of website success will improve, too. Data shows that for every second faster that a page loads, website conversion rates go up. For example, a page with a load time of nine seconds may only have a conversation rate of a mere 1.73 percent, whereas the same page with a load time of zero seconds has a conversion rate of 8.11 percent. That’s a big difference. 

How to Improve Website Performance

Many different pieces of your website affect its performance. 

The first thing to consider is page weight, which is just the size of a webpage. For those who aren’t especially computer savvy, this idea can best be understood like this: the more that you have on a webpage, the slower it will be, and the more you put on a page, the more weight you’re adding. You can improve this by favoring clean, simple layouts and minimizing the amount of excess content on display. This is especially true of images, which can be useful, but also slow things down significantly. You can also compress and resize images to improve load time.

The other fixes for improving website performance are a bit more technical, and perhaps better left to the pros–things like choosing the right web host, deferring render-blocking code, compressing files, browser caching, and reducing HTTP requests. If this sounds like we’re speaking a foreign language, not to worry–our team can provide all of the assistance and support you need. 

Get Help from NUVEW Today

To learn more about improving your website performance and to get help from a professional with years of experience, call the digital marketing experts at NUVEW today. We look forward to working with you!