Introduction:
Did you know that the goldfish have a longer attention span than humans? Humans are not the best when it comes to paying attention. When we’re coming across websites, we’re expecting fast pages & interactions. If a page takes too long to load or refresh, we’re probably gonna get frustrated with the site and leave. We are not the most patient & attentive.
Optimizing your website to enhance performance is a good practice to ensure good experience and feedback from the user’s side. In this blog, we’ll go over what web-performance & optimization is, how it affects a website, how to optimize your own website, and then look at some websites & their performances.
What is Web-Performance & Optimization?
When I say ‘Web-Performance’, I’m referring to how smoothly a website runs & works for the client side. Things like refreshing time, page loading time, button interactivity time, (etc..) all contribute to the overall Web-Performance. The Optimization of web-performance is organizing the contents and make-up of your website so that you are minimizing as much requests and storage use as possible to improve the performance your website runs at.
What affects the web-performance.
Many things can go into affecting the performance of a website. For example, the quantity of HTTP requests, image sizes, number of images, external scripts, how much code you use, etc… The list could go on and on forever.
What are the impacts?
These things affect a website’s performance because they are piling more work for the website’s server to respond to. For example, when you’re giving a ton of HTTP requests to the server, you’re giving a heavy amount of work for the server to handle, and therefore it will cause the performance of the website to slow down. Lots of images can give the website too many to render at once, hindering the performance of the site. Bigger images can give the site even more to handle rendering.
The Juggling Analogy.
All of these factors can cause a site’s performance to slow down because they are giving the site a great number of tasks to handle at a time. Think of it like juggling ball. When you’re juggling 1 ball with 2 hands, it’s simple. You just send the single ball to the other hand and repeat. If you add another ball, it increases the difficulty slightly, but it’s just 2 balls for your 2 hands to handle.
Now it gets difficult to keep track when you add yet another ball, leaving you 3 balls. If you’re not used to juggling, you’ll probably fail right away. Now imagine you keep on adding and adding more balls. It gets exponentially harder to keep track of every ball and it ends up overwhelming you. It’s kind of the same for websites when you’re overloading it with tasks. It hinders how well it can respond to each of the tasks and causes the site to underperform.
How does web-performance optimization affect a website?
Web-Performance optimization has lots of effects on a website. By optimizing your site, you can minimize page loading time, improve web response time, & enhance the overall functionality of a website.
How to optimize your website
Now that we’ve gone over what web-performance optimization is and what it does, we’ll discuss some of the ways you can optimize YOUR website.
Optimizing Images:
One great way to optimize your website is to optimize your images. Chances are, you don’t even know how big your image sizes really are. Sometimes, an image (or images) can be too big or bigger than needed on a site. This causes unnecessary storage to be used up. To address this, you can compress your images. Compressing images reduces the size of the image while doing the best to maintain the quality. This is one of the best ways to reduce unwanted storage use & speed up your website’s performance
Limiting HTTP Requests:
Http requests are things that a developer can use to request for different assets online through the internet. Lots of requests are used in many websites, which can cause an overload on the server’s task-handling. A good way to optimize your website is to try to minimize the amount of requests that you use in your site as much as possible. It’s like trying to spend on a budget. Only keep what you need.
Minimize your HTML, CSS and/or JS files:
Many sites have HTML, CSS and/or JS files that include more things than they actually need. A good way to improve your site’s performance is to try to go through your site’s files and clean up excess code or unneeded code. When there’s less to read on these files for the site, it gives the server less to handle, & therefore improves the site’s overall performance.
Use a Good & Reputable web hosting service:
The very web hosting service can affect the speed of your website. Just like how your own website can slow down if it’s overloaded with requests, if a hosting service is overloaded with requests or responds slow to them, it can slow down the very sites that it services onto the web. When we’re talking about how long it takes for web servers to respond to requests, we call it the response time. When looking for a hosting service, between 100ms and 200ms is recommended for good performance speeds.
There are loads of different ways and steps you can take to optimize your website for the better if not the best performance, but these are just some of the great ways to go about doing it.
Websites & Their Performances
According to a case study done by DigitalSilk; Craigslist and Wikipedia were the top fastest websites out of loads of other sites, each of the 2 with loading times between 1.40 and 1.35 seconds. Out of all the sites, instagram finished last with an average of 5.45 seconds loading time!
Since Wikipedia and Craigslist are websites that are mainly inclined to displaying text throughout their site, their requests are rather easier and simpler for servers to process. Thus, it would only make sense that they would place so high and be one of the fastest sites.
Instagram is a VERY heavy site when it comes to storage hogging content, such as videos and images. Due to how densely spread out the instagram site is with images, it’s no wonder that it placed last.
Of course, different optimization techniques and factors could have also come into play when it comes to the loading time numbers and time— but we are just looking at the most obvious and possibly the biggest factors when it comes to determining them out.
This little bit was just a fun study I wanted to incorporate into the blog as we neared the conclusion to try to look at a site’s content structure & the correlation to its performance and speed. I thought it was interesting while I was researching, so I decided to share it in this blog.
Conclusion
Web performance is one of the things that most affects your website and lots of people don’t realize it enough. The speed at which your website runs can affect the users first impression on your site. Depending on how fast or slow your website is, they might click off immediately, or stay at your site a bit longer. In this blog we talked about web-performance, what it is, how it affects your site, and some of the things you can do to improve your own website. Now that you’ve read through about Web-Performance & optimization, do you think your website can be made even faster?
Sources:
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/performance/speed-up-a-website
https://www.fandangoseo.com/blog/web-performance-optimization