4 Key Tips to Ensure Optimal Website Performance

The importance of optimal website performance is gaining momentum quickly. With Google’s Core Web Vitals becoming ranking factors in May 2021, focusing on loading speed and uptime is no longer a choice. It’s a necessity.

Regardless of the industry, if your business has an online presence, it’s imperative to beef up your website performance efforts. Besides being imperative for customer experience, the performance of your website is an integral part of your overall business and marketing strategy.

Let’s take a closer look at why website performance requires extra attention, and four key ways to ensure it.

The Importance of Website Performance for Profitability

Website performance is one of the pillars of online UX (user experience) and customer experience. Since many consumers are willing to pay for products and services from brands with better customer experience, improving it is on every company’s agenda.

Higher Conversion Rates

When users stay on a company’s website and interact with the content, they have higher chances of converting. That’s only possible if the website performs according to plan and lives up to users’ expectations (e.g. loading speed, reaction time, etc.).

Examples:

• Amazon calculated that it would lose $1.6 billion a year if the website took only one second later to load. While the effect for smaller businesses isn’t that drastic, it can still be a game changer.
• Pinterest rebuilt pages for optimal performance and saw a 40% decrease in wait time, a 15% increase in SEO traffic, and a 15% in conversion rates.
• Google found that less than half a second of search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%.

Overall, a faulty functioning website could cost any business a substantial amount. Even a small e-commerce company could feel a serious effect on its revenue.

Higher ROI

The results of a company’s digital efforts are directly proportional to the website’s performance. Regardless of how stellar the services or goods you offer are or how amazing the content you post is, a slowly loading webpage could turn the customer away.

Without proper data and insights into website performance, it’s impossible to estimate the affects a website has on a company or if your online efforts are even working. Ultimately, you need to know what’s broken or under performing in order to fix it to win back customers and improve ROI.

How to Improve Website Performance

To ensure optimal website performance, you need to focus on the following tactics.

1. Monitor Key Website Metrics

Consider working on these website metrics to improve your website or app performance.

• Page speed and load time – the time it takes to download and display the full content of the page.
• First contentful paint — the time from the moment the page starts loading to the moment the content is rendered on the screen.
• Bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing just one page.
• Time to interaction — the time it takes for the website to respond to the user’s input.
• Error rate — the number of request problems in relation to the number of requests.
• Connection time — the time it takes for the connection between the user’s browser and your origin server is established.
• Transaction failures — how often do transaction (check out, filling out forms, purchases, searches, user login, etc.) failures occur.

In order to have a full understanding of your website’s performance, it’s important to monitor these metrics thoroughly.

2. Set up Alerts

To catch the problem and react to it in a timely manner, it’s important to set up performance alerts. Website transaction monitoring tracks each transaction uptime and performance and alerts the website operator the second a problem occurs.

For e-commerce companies, website operation can be tedious, especially during high times like holidays. By setting up website transaction monitoring, they can cut losses, prevent security breaches, and minimize (or eliminate) downtime when a problem occurs. A timely alert can help the designated person respond to the problem immediately.

Outages, downtime, and transaction failures can occur at any second. By employing alerts, you can make sure that the person responsible for reacting is the first to know.

Depending on the tools you use for alerts, you can set up their number and frequency as well as list the people you want these alerts to go to.

With App Synthetic Monitor, it’s possible to receive alerts after regular checks, which are conducted 24/7/365. It gives you an opportunity to fix performance issues before they affect users.

3. Test New Features Before They Go Live

Rolling out new features for your website can turn into a nightmare. If they don’t work properly, you could face significant downtime, transaction problems, interactivity issues, and much more. That’s why it’s imperative to test new features carefully before they go live.

The best way to run the tests is in tandem with synthetic performance monitoring. These tools don’t need real users to gather data and check if the features are working. They use scripts that simulate interactions between a user and the server, tracking a variety of website performance metrics.

Accordingly, you can deal with any issues that occur before they result in poor CX (customer experience).

Web developers can test new features while still in production, gaining valuable insights, and making changes as they go along.

4. Proactively Monitor Performance on the Global Level

If part of your target audience lives in different countries, you need to monitor how your website performs when visited from any country beyond the U.S.

App Synthetic Monitor has 85 monitoring stations in 43 countries, allowing you to catch performance problems on the global level and ensure an excellent user experience for international clients.

Learn More About Optimal Website Performance

Every business aims at having its website perform at top capacity. To ensure optimal performance, it’s imperative to monitor the way your website works at all times. Synthetic monitoring is a highly efficient way to make sure a website operates flawlessly without hindering the user experience.

App Synthetic Monitor was created specifically to ensure top website performance with proactive 24/7/365 monitoring. To learn more about this tool, please contact us at any convenient time.