Have you ever wondered how important the first impression of your website is for potential customers? When your audience reaches a platform with fast-loading pages and a user-friendly design, they are eager to continue interacting with it. As a result, you can expect to see a significant increase in conversion rates and sales. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?
However, you should consider other aspects as well. Statistics show that Internet users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This demonstrates the particular importance and criticality of performance metrics. To improve performance, you may need special tools, web testing proxies, and some technical skills. We have gathered five recommendations that will improve the performance of your online platform. You shouldn’t ignore the tips from this article if you want to get more real customers online!
Tip 1. Implement User-Friendly Design with Simple Navigation
Unfriendly navigation and crammed designs usually aggravate consumers and cause them to miss out on conversion. To ensure higher performance, go back to the journey your target audience goes on after landing on your site to carry out the desired action. It may involve purchasing, logging in, registration, or some other type of interaction with your site. When such a journey is too many clicks, confusing directions, and/or slow loading times, you are being blocked by your design.
Draw out all the touchpoints that users will have on your site. Heat maps or recording sessions will help discover places where people leave or pause. Make menus simpler, forms shorter, and put more emphasis on the visibility of the most important CTAs. The most comfortable, intuitive structure can be a determining factor.
Tip 2. Optimize Existing Media Content
Images and videos occupy a large amount of space, and they are one of the major culprits of slow-loading websites. To improve performance, it is essential to conduct an audit of all media content. Delete old resources and optimize the pictures with applications that do not reduce their appearance. Optimizing files to compact formats such as WebP can significantly compress the same and still retain quality and details.
For example, one of the most common ways to optimize website images is to resize them according to display size. You can also use a lazy loading technique to delay loading data that is not visible on the screen. This ensures that the user only loads what they are viewing. Do not forget to compress the background videos and check on GIF use. Efficient media manipulation minimizes bandwidth, decreases loading time, and maintains more time on your site.
Tip 3. Use Browser Caching and CDNs
A seemingly effective yet unexploited trick to speed up the site is browser caching. It caches files that do not change commonly, i.e., scripts, stylesheets, and images, on the user’s browser. This reduces the need to retrieve those components repeatedly, thereby significantly decreasing loading times. Create a valid cache expiration header to allow the browser to understand how to retain files before refreshing them.
What else? Add this with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to take performance a step further. CDNs deploy your material to a global network of servers, ensuring that users load your site from the closest data center. This reduces latency, eases strain on the servers, and makes it more stable when getting overwhelmed with traffic. In combination, caching and CDNs create a solid structure towards high-speed and consistent performance.
Tip 4. Test Your Website Continuously
Undoubtedly, you should monitor your website and track its performance. Moreover, you should check the website from different regions if you are targeting an international audience. How to do this? You can use mobile proxies for website testing, simulating connections from different countries. This way, you can understand how your product works for different audiences. Most importantly, only trust reliable proxy server providers, such as iProxy. So, what should you pay attention to during testing?
- Page load time.
- Time to first byte (TTFB).
- Time to interactive.
- Start render.
- Total page size.
These are key indicators that together form the overall performance of the site. The better the indicators, the better your website. Moreover, you should also test other aspects, including bugs and errors. Any problem that arises is a clear sign of the need to conduct detailed testing to identify weaknesses and eliminate them as quickly as possible.
Tip 5. Review Built-in Plugins and Scripts
Third-party scripts and plugins are both useful and dangerous simultaneously. Although they extend functionality and features, excess or badly constructed ones can result in a decrease in speed on your site. Check all active plug-ins and embedded scripts. Ask a question: Do I really need this tool? Otherwise, disable or remove it so that your site does not have to work harder.
Conduct a performance audit, running it with some tools such as Lighthouse or GTmetrix to identify the scripts holding down the loading times. Such bloated plugins should be replaced, and non-essential script loading should be postponed. To the extent possible, offer features at the native level or directly within the code of your site.
Final Thoughts
It’s no secret that website speed and overall performance can be too costly. In many cases, potential customers may leave the site due to a difficult experience and choose competitors. If you don’t want to lose out on additional revenue, you need to know what it takes to achieve optimal website performance. In this article, we’ve listed a number of tips, including image optimization, browser caching, and more.
Most importantly, don’t forget to monitor your site’s performance on a regular basis. If you are an international company, then you will most likely need the help of additional proxy servers for testing. This will help you connect to the site from one place as if you were in another country and check its performance. For such purposes, you should choose reliable providers, and iProxy is one of them. Your website should work the same for every user, no matter where they are located. We hope our article will help you achieve better performance and capture a larger share of customers in the online market!
