The online market has become very competitive in the last few years. Even a single second delay in website page load can affect overall page views, customer dissatisfaction, and lowers conversion rate.
The chances that the user will abandon your website increase if it does not load in 3 seconds. Low-performance website reduces half of your customers that could have been converted into business, diminishing your online presence too. Your competitors are using the most skilled developers and using the latest technology to fill this gap, so why are you lagging.
There are a lot of factors that play an essential role in user engagement.
One of the critical elements that are significant in engaging a user is proper website design. Here we suggest substantial aspects that can affect the performance of the sites and upsurge the website’s existence online.
Remove Unused Library Files
Most of the time when your development team is given a website development task, they are clear about the actual requirement, but what happens when the client’s condition is not upfront, and the changes are made at any point in development. Programmers who are engaged in creating the website, have already added the library files that are getting used in the existing code.
But when the changes come from the client-side, they start developing the new code for the change request. In the course of creating the new requirement, although they remove the
previous code, they tend to forget to remove the library files used to code the initial condition. This makes the website heavy with user data and hence affects the overall page load time.
This can reduce the website performance. We suggest you remove unused library files from the code to upgrade the site’s performance. Only a good developer knows this fact. You should hire the right website development firm to develop your company’s website, which has highly skilled developers and can emphasize on website performance from the initial stage itself.
Upload Reduced Size of Images–
A good website has a lot of visuals that stimulate the aesthetic sense of users, thereby increasing the chances of connection. User is much interested in visual content on the website than that of text content.
Most of the designers in web development firms are advised to use graphical content because this can boost up the user connection and engagement with your business. Hence, an excellent visual of your website enhances professionalism and your brand value.
To develop a high valued graphical user interface UX/UI for your website, the designers need to add high-quality images and icons which have high image size. A lot of good programmers know how to reduce image size without affecting their visual appeal.
The image size can be reduced with excellent coding skills, thereby maintaining the high graphical content value. We suggest you hire an experienced website development firm having a combination of highly skilled designers and developers who understand the importance of your business and can lift your online presence and encourage user engagement.
Optimize Thumbnail
The eCommerce site is loaded with a lot of product images. Each category of a product shows thumbnails and many more thumbnails are nested in inner subcategories of products. Thumbnails are a great way of showing the product image with reduced image size. A good developer will always convert the image into the thumbnail and then upload it on the website. You can ask the developer to keep the thumbnail size as small as possible so that the website page load time could be reduced.
SQL Query Optimization by Indexing
If your website is connected with the database; it tends to take time in loading as the data in the database takes server time to load. The SQL queries that run behind the code takes time if it is written in a sophisticated manner. The SQL queries should always be written most simply. Indexing is required to return the requested data on the website from the database.
There are two ways of indexing:
- a) Clustered
- b) NON Clustered.
Clustered indexing allows you to create a separate index for frequently used queries. So, when the query executes on page load, the time to run the question is reduced to a greater extent and thus improving the website performance, which cannot be done using clustered indexing. Query optimization helps overall website performance by reducing page load time.
Download CDN
Most off the designers and developers are using free templates and customize it later as per the client’s requirement. Mostly these templates use bootstrap files where CSS and JS files are presently inbuilt, and that runs every time the website loads.
When the CSS and JS files are called from the server, the requests will be routed to a server near them and will take time to load. Using a CDN can improve your user’s experience in terms of speed, and as we already know by now that speed matters!
We suggest you to first download the CDN file for CSS, JS files in your system and then add their folder in the code. This way, the page load time is reduced sufficiently, improving the website’s performance and Content Delivery will become faster. CDN is often free to download from the internet, so it will not cost you any extra charge. A good developer from an experienced Website development firm is always aware of this.
Conclusion
Website performance plays a key role in achieving your business goal in an online venture. Having a complex site with features that are either unused or outdated can make you struggle to reach a high level of performance.
Apart from keeping the website design and feature simple, all of the factors mentioned above can support you in improving your website’s performance, and if taken care of during the time of website development, can help you interact with your potential customers meaningfully. This may save your customers from website abandonment and help you retain your customers for business gains.