With the new dawn on the internet, having a website is a very desirable thing to have. No matter what kind of niche you are in, you need to have your website. Your website is more like your online self to other people who don’t know you.
Having a fully-fledged and optimized website is essential, especially if you put your users at the forefront and want them to have a better experience while visiting your website. Research conducted by the tech giant Google showed that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load.
What does this mean to you and your users? If you optimize your website to load faster than your competitor, then you are at the forefront of grabbing users from competitors with lower loading times. In this piece, you will look at some of the ways you can implement to improve the performance and speed of your website. This includes loading times, time to interact, and many other things.
Optimizing images
Images serve a huge role in websites these days. Apart from impacting a visual representation, they also easily attract users. On the same note, prints can slow your website, especially when you use many of them a lot without optimizing. These are some of the ways you can implement to improve and optimize image performance on your website.
- Start implementing the use of webP images.
According to developers google, “WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. WebP allows web admins and web developers to create smaller, richer images that make the web faster. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.
Lossless WebP supports transparency (also known as alpha channel) at the cost of just 22% additional bytes. For cases when lossy RGB compression is acceptable, lossy WebP also supports transparency, typically providing 3× smaller file sizes compared to PNG.”
- Leverage image Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is like APIs for accessing images based on the user's location. They will serve the user images with servers near them. This not only improves the delivery network but also speeds up the response and delivery time.
- Compress images to reduce their file size
Big size images are always heavy and require a lot of time to fully render, while smaller images will require little time to render. Compressing your images to smaller file sizes will help improve your page speed performance.
- Use proper size images
This involves showing the right images on various devices. You don’t want to show desktop size images on mobile devices. We can tailor the right size images for both mobile and desktop devices.
Leverage lazy loading techniques
Lazy loading has become very crucial for improving and optimizing the performance of any modern website. Most renowned websites (Medium etc.) implement these techniques in one way or another. Lazy loading improves the web performance without also hurting the performance and speed of the servers.
Lazy loading ensures that the necessary components/ sections of the pages are shown to the user when they are needed and not immediately when the user visits the page. This also gives more demanding sections of the page time to load while others wait until their initial print.
Implement browser caching
Caching involves storing copies of data or files relating to your website temporarily on the browser or cache so they can be accessed faster. For data that doesn’t change often, you can implement browser caching, so the websites have to load faster and only load parts that change so often.
Caching ensures the browser will only download information that isn't cached, and this saves a lot of time that could be used to load the whole page.
Conclusion
Implementing the above techniques into your website will help improve the page speed and provide your users with a better user experience. It will also improve your user retention rate, which is very helpful for your product.
To recap, some of the ways we have seen include.
- Implement browser caching
- Leverage Content Delivery Network.
- Optimize images and use modern image format (webP)