A Practical Guide to Balancing Website Performance and Cost

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The ranking of your website heavily depends on its speed and overall performance. Generally speaking, website performance refers to how quickly a website loads, how the interactive components function, and how quickly it responds to user interactions.

Unfortunately, improving your website’s performance without breaking the bank can be difficult. Here’s a short guide explaining how to measure website performance and ways to improve it without compromising on the cost.

How to Measure Website Speed and Performance

First things first, analyze the current speed of your website. You can use free and paid tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or WebPageTest to analyze key metrics like page load speed and overall performance scores.

Experts also recommend monitoring Core Web Vitals. This is a set of three metrics that measure critical performance aspects, such as:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – the loading speed of webpages, ideally 2.5 seconds.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – the time it takes for the browser to respond to a user’s request, ideally 200 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – the visual stability of a page. To clarify, CLS measures how much the content shifts on the page when a user opens the webpage. A good CLS is less than 0.1 seconds.

How to Improve Website Performance

Here are five measures you can take to improve your website’s performance.

Choose the Right Hosting Plan

Standard hosting plans with shared networks are widely common. However, as your business needs expand, upgrading to a premium or individual hosting plan becomes necessary. Consider using a Virtual Private Server (VPS), where you have a dedicated share of resources like RAM, CPU, and bandwidth. With a VPS server, you can configure your operating system and applications, boosting the page speed.

Reliable hosting providers, such as Liquid Web, also give you root access, which means you can have full control over the server environment.

Ensure Cross-Device Compatibility

Cross-device compatibility has a direct impact on your website’s performance and customer satisfaction. More than 50% of users are likely to abandon a website that doesn’t offer a mobile-friendly interface. Make sure the graphics and the interactive elements are working on every interface, including mobile phones and computer screens.

Optimize Images

Optimizing images is one of the most common and cost-effective ways to boost page loading speed. Compress images and use formats like WebP and JPEG to ensure images are appropriately sized for every screen.

Limit the Number of HTTP Requests

Many webpages require browsers to make multiple HTTP requests to load images and scripts. With each request, the overall load time for a webpage increases. The best way to avoid this is to limit the number of HTTP requests. Conduct a speed test to determine which HTTP requests are taking the most time.

Use Real Devices to Test the Website

Continuous monitoring is one of the most effective ways to optimize your website’s performance. Conduct regular speed tests and check the site’s interface on real devices to detect inefficiencies.