Tips To Improve Your Website Performance

By Author: Allen Kory
Total Articles: 27
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Contrary to popular belief, the look of your website isn't the only factor in its success. If it isn't quick to load, then you may find that it is not successful at all. This is because slow performing websites tend to rank lower in the search engines, and a website visitor doesn't want to stick around for the website to load. In this article I want to take a little look at some techniques that experts in Phoenix web design use to ensure that a website loads quickly.

Firstly, you are going to need to begin using performance software. I suggest that you look into using Google Analytics. This will tell you how fast your website is loading on average, and perhaps more importantly, what pages are the slowing down your load times. It also has a number of features which are going to be helpful for improving your website. If you don't know how to use it, find a Phoenix Web Design Company that can teach you, or even analyse it for you.

You may want to look into the amount of graphics that you use on your website. It seems to be a common misconception that the more graphics there on the site, the better it looks. This isn't ...
... true, not only can too many graphics make the website look confusing for your visitors, but it can also slow down the website considerably. Make sure you have no graphics on your website which are not needed. If the images are required, then make sure they are in the web friendly 'jpeg' format.

One of the most important things I can suggest when it comes to improving website performance is to look into something called 'code minimization'. As you know, there are hundreds of lines of code behind every single website. Often, inexperienced web designers write code in an inefficient way, which can cause websites to slow down considerably. I suggest you look into a company which specialises in Web Design in Phoenix to make the code more efficient for you. Something this simple could shave seconds off your page load times.

If you have CSS code and JavaScript on your website then try and include them in separate files to your normal HTML pages. This is because it gives the browser the ability to cache the file as opposed to having to reload it every single time a page is loaded, which can be quite cumbersome, both for the website visitor and your website browser. Again, if you are not experienced in web development this may be difficult, so do so look into a company in Phoenix who can help.

Finally, and this may be difficult for some companies, especially those on small budgets, but if you are using shared hosting for your website, try and get a dedicated server instead. It is slightly more expensive, but companies that operate shared hosting plans tend to pack their servers to the brim, and this slows it down considerably, especially if there are a lot of people trying to access the server at the same time.

Of course, this is just a small sample of the many things that you can do to improve the performance of your website. Put some of these into practice now and not only will you find yourself creeping up the search engine rankings, but you may even find that customers stick around for far longer. If you want to improve the performance of your website even more, I would suggest you look into hiring a Phoenix Web Design Company, trust me, it is going to be worth the investment.