Wouldn’t it be great if your website loads the moment you enter the URL? Although instant loading is actually impossible, by optimizing your website performance it’s possible to get close! While building a website, the developer should always keep performance in consideration.
How do I know how well my website is performing?
There is a super useful tool available online on https://pagespeed.web.dev/. It gives you insights in your page speed by looking at aspects like content layout shift and largest contentful paint, so you know what you can improve to make your page load faster.
It’s a lot of information that might be hard to all fully understand though. That’s why some initial advise on the results of a test is free at RvdB Solutions! Get in touch, let me know what page you want to improve and I’ll tell you where we can reduce loading times. Of course, the advise comes with an offer to apply this for you.
What are the biggest wins in performance?
This can be different for every website, but there are often some similarities. Proper image sizing to lower the largest contentful paint, skeleton loaders to avoid content layout shift and smart page caching to lower the time to first bite are just some of the possibilities to get your website in the green.
WordPress does some of this for you in a useful way. If you are using default WordPress blocks in the block editor, they should automatically provide the right image sizes for the right device. When using a plugin like WooCommerce, it comes with a skeleton loader, which is basically a placeholder to fill the same space as the loaded content will, making sure the content around it doesn’t suddenly change position. This is called content layout shift.
There are a lot of caching options, some of them are free or included with your websites hosting, some of them are behind a paywall but allow you to customize the caching in a smart way. In my opinion, it’s usually worth investing in proper caching, as it is almost guaranteed to improve your websites performance.
Why is performance important?
There are two main reasons why performance is important. First of all, nowadays people are always in a hurry. If it takes too long to load each page on your website, they might move on to your competition that did optimize their website. User experience is key to keep them on your site.
The second reason is SEO: Search Engine Optimization. When Google ranks your pages, it looks at the content, but also at the performance. On top of that, because of the first reason I mentioned, the bounce rate on your page might be high cause it to be ranked even worse.
This will finally result into less traffic and less conversions. If instead you would invest into the performance of your website, visitors will enjoy their stay a lot more. Google will like this as well, making your site easier to find, increasing your traffic, conversions and eventually this investment will turn into profit!
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