Ensuring that your site works flawlessly isn't easy, but paying attention to the factors that affect performance to improve your site's performance relative to search engine rankings and push your site to the top is a long journey.
Yes, meeting the needs of website visitors can be a challenge. Visitors demand top-notch design, short load times, fast response, interactive media, and more.
Of course putting more elements as well as content on your website also increases the risk of something going wrong. This article will look at why site performance matters, and what you can do to improve it.
Competition
The best place to start when learning to analyze site performance is to measure the competition's performance as well. Knowing how well your competitors are doing, but also where you measure up to them gives you a great starting point.
This will give you a better idea of what the site is performing and how your site performs.
Use one of the many free performance tools to assess your competition. You can also try looking up key terms to see how they rank. Understanding how your competition ranks also gives you an idea of why your site's performance matters.
When you know how they rank better than you – assuming they do – you'll understand the critical factors you need to improve on.
site speed
Another important part of knowing how to measure a website's performance is measuring how fast it loads. There are many free website speed testing tools out there that can help with this.
There are several ways to increase site loading speeds if it is too slow, such as removing some plugins or compressing images and video content. Remember that people demand instant gratification, and no one has the patience to wait more than a few seconds for a site to load.
The number of appropriate backlinks
Website backlinks are another integral part of good SEO. What are website backlinks you ask? Whenever someone creates a link from your website to yours, it is a backlink.
The more of these you have, the better. Unfortunately, not every backlink has the same quality.
Search engines prefer that you choose quality over quantity when it comes to backlinks.
The backlinks you have must be appropriate. They must come from websites related to your industry. Having lots of links from relevant websites also builds your authority.
The more people are connected to you, the more interesting and relevant your content should be. Becoming an authority in the field is one way to improve your website's SEO performance.
That's another reason you need proper backlinks — too many unrelated spam quality backlinks actually reduce your authority and your online ranking.
how much content do you have
Content is — and always will be — king when it comes to SEO. The more content you have, the more chances you have to rank high in search engine results.
That's why it's so vital that you not only have a website, but also a blog where you share news, tips and tricks, and other interesting pieces of writing.
Having more content also gives you more chances to gain backlinks from others in the same niche. When people read your content, they can be inspired by it.
People want to share your content with others, so they connect to it on social media or their own website, creating another backlink in the process.
How many visitors do you have? How long do they stay?
Visitor count is an obvious metric for your website's performance. The better the quality of your website, the more people it will attract.
The visitor count is also an indication of your placement in search engine results. A high ranking means more people are coming to your site, so you can take a high visitor count as a sign that your site is performing well.
How much time visitors spend on a website can be just as important as the number of connections in the first place.
It doesn't mean much if the average visitor spends a few seconds on your site before disconnecting. This is a sign that your site takes too long to load.
With a few changes to speed up loading time, you can drive more people to your site. Look at the average visitor count and visit time, and think about what the information tells you.
How are your paid ads?
If you're going to pay for advertising, you want to know it's working as planned. Most sites that sell their ads, such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads, have many analytical tools to assess how your ads work.
One of the reasons to invest in ads is that they have long-term benefits, such as generating more organic traffic even after the campaign ends.
Adjust your ads until they perform at their best for the most effective long-term results of the short-term paid-to-advertise solution.
Factors that harm your ranking
Understanding the different factors that affect your website's performance is crucial to correcting these errors. Here are some of the things that can affect your performance,
too many plugins
Plugins can give your site a lot more functionality, but not all plugins are created equal. All plugins use resources and slow down your site, some more than others.
While there are some plugins you'll want to use, think carefully about which ones you have and which ones you really need.
Removing unnecessary plugins is one of the easiest ways to improve your website's SEO performance as it makes your website load faster.
large image files
Media such as images and videos are an essential part of web content. Images can break the flow of a long written post and thus provide an exciting way to share information.
The problem is that images can also significantly affect site load times as well as user experience. You need to strike a balance between image quality and image file size. That is, you need a high-quality image that loads quickly.
Errors 404
404 errors are one of the worst things that can happen to a website. One of the critical features of a free website performance tool is checking for 404 errors.
Broken pages and links have a significant adverse effect on the user experience and therefore are something Google and other search engines will heavily penalize you. Remove any dead links from your site and update the links as appropriate to keep them connected.
Try a CDN to improve your website's performance
CDN is a system that uses distributed servers to deliver websites, but also other web content, depending on the user's location and the content of the website.
Essentially a way to take static files from a website, such as CSS, images, as well as JavaScript, and deliver them via web servers that are closest to the user's physical location. Closer proximity equates to faster charge time.
Adopt cloud-based website monitoring
There are significant advantages to offloading your website monitoring to a cloud-based host – cost, scalability, as well as efficiency, to name a few. Not to mention this frees you up to focus on growing your business, which matters most anyway.
Review your hosting service plan to improve your website's performance
If you've gone through the above and still find that web performance has been impacted, then check with your hosting provider to see if you have shared or dedicated hosting.
A shared hosting account often involves sharing server space with dozens of other companies where website speed is impacted by the number of people using the servers. If this is the case then maybe it's time to consider a dedicated plan where you have exclusive access to the server.
Conclusion on how to improve website performance
The real test of how well your site does is whether or not you actively gain new customers each month. So the more new customers you get, the better your site is performing.
In this era of instant updates, same-day delivery and expectations of customer service, website visitors simply won't wait long for your site to download.
Web performance as well as download speeds are a growing science and research shows that milliseconds can make a real difference in customer behavior and drive those sales conversions.
Most website owners automatically assume that they need all possible features to get the most customers.
But these extra features, like the fashion one, are only good if customers don't have to wait 10 seconds for the site to load.
Always remember, the main point of your website is to improve traffic and make money. Bright images and trendy styles may look good and good, but they can be too harmful.
With Colors Agency, we guarantee much more than just an attractive look and a modern layout for your website. Our main focus is to offer companies around the world effective solutions, that is, to generate visibility on the internet.
Our agency elaborates SEO strategies, as well as brand positioning for large, medium and small multinational companies, all projects are important to us.
