What makes a great website?
The first thing that comes to mind might be a design that’s a perfect representation of the brand identity you want to portray to the world, or the features which you could provide to elevate your user’s experience. However, an often overlooked pillar is how those features perform, and the scale at which performance impacts a visitor’s overall experience.
Why optimization matters
In a digital landscape that’s more competitive than ever, every second counts – quite literally.
In 2009, a joint presentation by Eric Schurman (Bing) and Jake Brutlag (Google) showcased the impact of site speed on user engagement, retention, and conversions, following a series of experiments conducted at both companies. The team at Google subjected their users to a delay of less than half a second, and observed a 0.6% drop in user engagement. The team at Bing conducted similar experiments with a 2 second delay, and saw revenue per user drop by over 4% on average.
It was these findings that led Google to including page speed within its rankings in 2010. This meant that now page speed was not only intrinsically important to user experience and conversion rates, but now it would impact a site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well.
Many such studies have been conducted in the years since, ultimately leading to the same core truth: users do not want to wait.
With page speed being essential not only for keeping users on your website, but also getting them there in the first place, this makes optimizing your page speed more important than ever.
How to Improve your sites’s performance
There are many factors which impact a website’s page speed which can be targeted when trying to optimize a website’s page speed. Some of these start from the ground floor, before your website ever even goes live. Others include tools which can be used to continue improving optimizations on your website as it, along with the industry itself, changes with time.
At Up, we build websites with optimization in mind throughout the full life cycle of a web development project. From design, to development, and continued optimizations as part of our Support and Maintenance Agreements, we’ve got our sights set on optimization at every step of the way.
Hosting
Before even a single line of code is written, you can start laying the foundations for a high-performing website. One important consideration is where your website will be hosted. By taking the time to research different hosting providers and choosing one that best suits your website’s needs, you can set the right foundations for performance from the very beginning.
This is because website hosting isn’t a one-size-fits-all decision, and where your website is hosted can have a significant impact on its performance. We prefer to host our websites on WP Engine, a hosting provider specifically designed to optimize and support WordPress websites. Their platform is built with WordPress performance, security, and reliability in mind, helping ensure your website runs as efficiently as possible.
Some of the key benefits of hosting your WordPress website with a provider specifically built to support WordPress include:
Servers are configured specifically for WordPress, helping websites process requests and deliver pages efficiently
Server-level caching stores frequently requested content, allowing pages to be delivered more quickly without needing to generate them from scratch each time.
A CDN serves static content such as images, CSS and JavaScript from servers around the world, helping reduce the distance data needs to travel to reach visitors.
Modern server technology, up-to-date PHP versions and optimised databases can help improve response times and provide the resources needed for a fast, reliable website.
Hosting infrastructure can be scaled to handle increases in traffic, helping maintain performance when more visitors are accessing the website at the same time.
Custom Themes
A well-built custom theme does more than just help to build your brand’s personal identity. Believe it or not, it can also help your website run more efficiently. Although convenient, pre-built themes can often have a negative impact on your website’s performance. This is because, in order to provide a one-size-fits-all solution, these themes are loaded with a ton of content and functionality to appeal to a wide variety of potential customers.
While this flexibility can be useful, it can also mean that your website is loading scripts, styles and features that you may never even need or use. All of this unnecessary content can bloat your website, making it heavier and less responsive for the people visiting it. As we’ve already seen, even small increases in load time can have a significant impact on user behaviour, so it’s important to build the foundations of your website with your specific needs in mind.
A custom theme gives us much greater control over those foundations, allowing us to build with performance in mind from the very beginning.
Our designers craft a thoughtful and effective website design, with you and your brand specifically in mind. By working closely with you and understanding your needs, we can ensure that your design includes everything your website needs – and that you won’t be weighed down by what it doesn’t.
Optimizing Images
Optimizing images is one of the simplest ways to improve page speed. Large or poorly optimized images slow down a page and can potentially negatively affect LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), a key measure of how quickly the main content appears.
There are several strategies we implement within all of our custom themes as well as part of ongoing maintenance that reduce the impact images have on performance:
Image compression and modern image formats such as WebP and AVIF can provide substantially smaller image file sizes than traditional formats such as JPG or PNG, while maintaining good image quality. Converting images before uploading them, or utilizing plugins that automatically convert images on upload, can lead to impactful file size reductions and help reduce loading times.
One of the many useful features of WordPress is that when you upload an image, it automatically generates a variety of sizes of that image behind the scenes. We use responsive image techniques such as srcset to make these different versions available to the browser, allowing it to select an appropriately sized image for the device and viewport.
This means a visitor using a smaller mobile device doesn’t need to download the same large image that would be more appropriate for a large desktop display. By delivering an appropriately sized image, we can reduce unnecessary downloads and improve overall loading performance.
Lazy loading is a web performance technique that delays the loading of non-critical resources, such as images and videos, until they are needed. By utilizing lazy loading for assets which appear below the fold, we can allow the browser to prioritize resources that are immediately visible when a visitor lands on the page.
This can reduce the amount of content the browser needs to load initially, helping the page become usable more quickly and creating a smoother first impression.
Plugins
Using plugins on your WordPress website can be a great way to add additional functionality, whether it’s user-facing or within the admin dashboard. For example, we love using Yoast for its powerful SEO tools, and WP Rocket for additional website optimization.
However, like most things in life, too much of a good thing can come with consequences. Just like themes, poorly optimized or overly resource-heavy plugins can add unnecessary weight to a website, potentially impacting performance. That’s why, when it comes to plugins, it’s important to find the right balance.
You can find a plugin for just about anything, but when it comes to core user-facing features of your website, it can make sense to build these directly into the theme. This gives you greater control over exactly what is included, helping to avoid unnecessary functionality and bloat.
For example, our custom themes include our own suite of conversion tools. These are a collection of common marketing features that we found were frequently being added to our clients’ websites through third-party plugins. By building these directly into the theme, we can achieve the same end goal without relying on additional plugins and the code, assets, and scripts they may introduce.
Because these tools are built as part of the theme, they can also be tailored to your specific requirements during the design and development process. This gives us greater control over how they work and perform, while also ensuring that they feel like a natural part of the website rather than an off-the-shelf feature bolted on afterwards.
The result is a website with the functionality you need, without adding unnecessary complexity or relying on a collection of third-party plugins to achieve it.
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