Web Performance Optimization (WPO) - What, Why and How

Web Performance Optimization (WPO) – What, Why and How

If you create a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load on mobile, you will be losing 53% of visitors. They will just abandon the site and go somewhere else to find the same information or buy the same product. (Source)

And that can cause serious loss in the long run, right? Well, that’s where Web Performance Optimization (WPO) techniques come in handy.

What is Web Performance Optimization?

Web Performance Optimization or WPO is the practice of improving a website’s performance. In other words, WPO is the process of speeding up the webpage so that it takes less amount of time to load.

Why is Web Performance Optimization very important for a website?

Websites today are not like they used to be a decade ago, plain and mostly text-based. Today’s websites are colorful and contain lots of images, animations, and other web elements that make them load slow. And, nobody likes to visit a slow website.

Here are some reasons why web performance optimization is necessary. A performance-optimized website:

has better engagement and conversions
reduces the server costs by reducing the bandwidth usage
has better chances of ranking higher in the search engines
reduces the bounce rate
offers a better user experience
increases the chances of users returning to the site, and
ultimately increases the ROI

Web Performance Optimization Tips

While much of web performance optimization revolves around the critical elements of website design, such as how images are displayed, CSS, and JavaScript, there are several other areas you can focus on for improved site performance.

Let’s take a look at some important WPO tips:

1. Reduce the number of HTTP requests

Reducing the number of HTTP requests is a great way to speed up your website and increase performance. And not just that, less number of HTTP requests also decreases the server load.

combine stylesheet and script files
minify HTML, CSS, and JS
serve scaled and compressed images
remove unnecessary images and other files
reduce the number of external scripts
load JavaScript files asynchronously

Basically, the point here is that more website files mean more HTTP requests and the bigger website files mean longer HTTP requests. And while optimizing a webpage for performance, your main goal should be to reduce the number of files and the size of files.

You can use GTMetrix or Google Pagespeed to know the number of HTTP requests.

2. Optimize images on the website

Not all images are created equal! Some image formats have lesser file sizes, some allow you to add animation effects, some offer transparent background, some are optimized for web uses, and some are ideal for printing.

It’s confusing at first but… here are some tips to optimize images on the website:

Resize the images as per the maximum width of the webpage before uploading it
Compress the images to reduce the file size. You can use free tools like TinyPNG and Kraken to compress the images
Use the modern image formats like .webp, and .jpeg, they have lesser filesize
Lazy loading images is another great way to reduce the initial load on the server

Following these tips will help you optimize the images and make the website load faster.

3. Optimize font loading

Fonts are one of the most important resources when building a website because they give a distinct look and feel, differentiate your brand from others, and set the tone of communication with users. However, their impact on the performance of a website is often underestimated.

When the website is first loaded, the browser looks for the font in its local cache, if it’s available it loads from there otherwise the browser downloads the font and then renders all the content.

Here are some tips to optimize the loading of fonts:

use better and optimized font formats like WOFF and WOFF2
preload the web font resources by using <link rel="preload">
since fonts are typically static resources, you can set proper browser caching for them
use font-display for better font rendering
load only the font styles that you actually need

Top 10 Google Fonts Speed Comparison — Top 10 Google Fonts and how much time they take to load. (source)

You can use the Lighthouse tool in the Google Chrome browser to further understand and optimize the font loading.

4. Minify code and use Gzip compression

Code minification is the process of removing extra characters, line breaks, comments, and unnecessary spaces from code files. You will be able to reduce the overall size of a webpage if you minify its CSS, JS, and HTML files.

Gzip compression is a server-level file compression method that further reduces the size of a webpage. It compresses the HTML, CSS, and JS files before they get sent to the browser.

Both code minification and gzip compression are very easy to implement on the website.

6. Use caching and lazy loading

Caching is necessary because if you don’t cache, your website will have to fetch data from the database each time a user visits a new page and that increases server load. There are two kinds of caching — browser caching and server caching.

Browser caching is the process of storing the website’s static resources such as CSS, JS, images, etc. into the browser’s local memory. This avoids downloading static resources every time the user visits your site and that ultimately makes the website load fast.
Server caching is the process of compressing and optimizing the website files at the server level itself. Varnish cache is one example of server-level caching.

Lazy loading is used to defer the loading of images that are currently not in the viewport (means, the images where the user has not yet scrolled to) and that improves the overall performance by reducing the initial load on the server. It’s highly recommended for websites that have lots of images.

5. Choose a better web hosting service

No matter how much you optimize your website, if the web hosting is not decent the performance will still not be good. Web hosting plays a crucial role in web performance.

If you want your website to perform at its best, you will need to find a web host that is fast, reliable, and secure all the time. Using shared hosting is certainly not recommended.

Some hosting services that we recommend are:

VPS
- AWS
- DigitalOcean
Managed hosting
- Cloudways
- Kinsta

If you’re tight on the budget, here are some free platforms to host your web development projects.

To find the other optimization possibilities, you can use Google’s free tool, PageSpeed Insights. Also, Mozilla’s MDN web performance docs is another great resource to learn more about WPO.