Optimizing Performance: Strategies for Speedy Custom Websites

TL;DR: Optimizing website performance provides a smooth user experience, improves search engine rankings, and reduces bounce rates. By implementing these strategies, you can significantly enhance your website’s performance and create a faster, more reliable experience for users.

Landing on a slow-loading website quickly turns anticipation into frustration as site visitors wait impatiently for content to appear. Users expect instant gratification—if your site doesn’t deliver, they’ll bounce faster than you can say “load time.” And that’s assuming they find you at all. A sluggish site not only frustrates visitors but also tanks your search rankings, making it virtually invisible online. Investing in a smooth, speedy user experience is now essential.

Here are six strategies we use to help optimize and improve a website’s performance:

Strategy #1: Image Optimization

Website performance can be improved tremendously by ensuring that images are optimized. This includes sizing image dimensions appropriately for the intended use, compressing them to reduce file size without compromising quality, and saving images in a more efficient next-gen format like WebP. Once images are optimized, it is important to “lazy load” them on the page. This strategy will identify images that appear “below the fold” and will load them when they are needed.

Not only will this approach lead to faster load times and enhanced SEO, but also, they will provide better performance on mobile devices and increase accessibility for website visitors with slower Internet speeds.

Strategy #2: Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

The process of minifying scripts involves eliminating unnecessary characters like whitespace, line breaks, and comments. As a result, the overall file size is reduced, which translates into faster download times and quicker page loading. Additionally, minifying these scripts decreases the number of HTTP requests made by the browser, reducing bandwidth usage and speeding up page rendering processes.

Strategy #3: CDN Image Hosting

CDN (Content Delivery Network) image hosting uses a network of servers to store and deliver images and other static content to website visitors based on their geographic location. In a nutshell, offloaded images are replicated and stored across multiple servers in different geographical regions.

When a web page requests an image, the CDN directs the request to a server that is nearest to the website visitor’s locale, reducing the distance that the data has to travel. This leads to faster load times and ensures a high-quality user experience on a global scale. Furthermore, CDNs are built for scalability and can handle large volumes of traffic without compromising website performance.

Strategy #4: Enable Website Caching

Caching is crucial for website performance, as it stores frequently accessed web page data and assets locally. When cached versions of web pages are revisited, the pages will load much faster since the web browser retrieves the stored versions instead of requesting them from the server and downloading them again. Ultimately, this reduces server load, enhances the user experience, and provides SEO benefits.

Strategy #5: Hosted Fonts

Hosting fonts on your own website offers some advantages that contribute to better performance, reliability, and control. It eliminates dependency on third-party servers, reduces latency (the delay of transferring data), and ensures that the website’s fonts load correctly.

If you are unable to host fonts on your website, then consider font preload and preconnect. This will give the browser a heads up that resources will need to be loaded from the external source, allowing the browser time to preemptively initiate the connection.

Strategy #6: Load Render-Blocking Scripts Asynchronously

Modifying third-party JavaScript files directly is typically out of a website developer’s control. To counteract this, it is important to load the scripts asynchronously to prevent them from blocking the rendering of the page. Scripts that are not asynchronous will load in the order that they appear in the code. If there is an issue with a script that is higher in the code, it can negatively impact the scripts below it, causing site visitors to see a blank or partially rendered page.

Asynchronous loading helps to improve the “Time to Interactive” metric, which measures how quickly a page becomes fully interactive. This is critical for user engagement, overall site usability, and higher search engine rankings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kimberly Stepp is a full-stack developer and one of our WordPress wizards. She has been making our clients’ dreams come true—and educating them about the importance of accessibility—since 2018. She’s also the founder and CEO of Mocha Tree Organics, which specializes in organic, natural, and vegan skincare products for sensitive and health-conscious consumers.

We’ve built custom websites for businesses in every industry and market sector over the last 25 years. Reach out when you’re ready.

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