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Why performance is the best way to improve the user experience

Why performance is the best way to improve the user experience

Fri, 09 Apr 2021

It’s easy to dwell on visual things like navigation, photos, and design when optimizing a website first. Though these things are undoubtedly important, they are not nearly as important as the overall performance of the website. That means performance on your website should be a top priority. This blog will dig deeper to uncover the reasons why the performance of your website is the key to improving user experience as well as key tips to do just that.

The negative effects of poor website performance

To clarify why web performance is so impactful, let’s take a look at what happens when you are having poor performance on the website. Whether your website is loading slowly or not loading correctly, both the search engine side and the user experience side have an impact on that.

Poor SEO

Firstly, your SEO’s going to suffer. Google has already made it clear that they favor better performing websites over those that are consistently slow. This is particularly true with mobile sites. Essentially, if your website is not performing well, it damages your findability.

Lowered Conversion Rate

Customers do not want to weed through complicated, confusing pages which are not loading properly. The longer it takes for a purchase to be completed, the more likely they will abandon their cart or head straight to the competition. If that doesn’t get you to take action to improve the performance of your website, nothing will.

Negative User Satisfaction

Your website aims to build confidence with your users. That doesn’t happen when your website doesn’t load properly. Most businesses can afford this not. While many of these negative effects above alone should suffice to make you take action, they are a nightmare together. It is always better to be proactive by taking advantage of performance tools on the website, hosting changes, and continuous optimization.

Tips for Improving Website Performance

Now that you understand why your performance on the web is so important, it’s time to address methods to make a positive change. Most people know the importance of caching but what about some new ways to improve the load time of your website.

First of all, if you experience traffic spikes it’s time to talk to your host. Your web hosting plan may not be able to handle traffic jumps or storage so it may be necessary to upgrade to a VPS or a dedicated server.

There are a lot of web performance tools that can be put to good use on your website, beyond changing your hosting plan. To get started, find out more about these here. Pay attention beyond that to your HTTP requests, the size of your images, and the reduction of redundant or unnecessary files or pages. All these little things may seem insignificant but they add up.

As long as you are proactive, you are going in the right direction. Improving the performance of your website should be a no-brainer, yet many website owners are focused on aesthetic things that don’t make a big difference. The experiences of your users are essential for your website to grow so take them seriously.