Website performance

A fast website is important for your visitors! That should be very obvious for everyone by now. This is also the reason why the performance is important to the search engines.

Moreover, if you already have many visitors, performance problems cost your server resources and that costs money.

A lot has been written about website performance and how important this is for your website visitors. Take it into account but first start by asking the right questions:

• How fast should your website load? Yes, of course as fast as possible but should it be as fast as speed.net? Or just faster than those of the competitors?
• What does it (still) need to achieve that speed?
• What is already going well on your site and what is going wrong?

Test the performance!

You can find an answer to the above questions by testing. Test, test, test! Yes, test! Test your own site, test the sites you see as an example and test sites of similar organizations or competitors.

We use these tools for this, for example Google Lighthouse (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights), GTMetrix (https://gtmetrix.com/) and Yellow Lab Tools (https://yellowlab.tools/).

How fast are your sample websites? How fast are competitor sites?

Does your site need to be even faster? Then you can see what you need to do better on the basis of the various tests.

Performance budget

You can also draw up a “performance budget” based on the answers you find to the above questions. This means that you determine the maximum number of resources that one page can request so that you can achieve the desired speed.

Resources can be anything in this regard. The biggest culprits when it comes to performance are usually pictures and photos, scripts and fonts. If they take up a lot of resources, you should ask what to omit.

Do you have any fun features to “share this on all social networks”? Reconsider this if you take the performance budget seriously. Often the underlying code is redundant and does not serve your website but that of social networks.

Are you using too many fonts? Ask your designer for advice. Loading fonts takes a long time.

Pictures speak louder than words!

We love to use images! But when it comes to performance, they are often fatal because they are unnecessarily large.

You should not only put images on your page in the correct resolution and format, it really makes sense to optimize them. For example with Compressor.io (https://compressor.io/).

That is exactly why we have built “PWT Image” (https://extensions.perfectwebteam.com/pwt-image) for Joomla. We have now also made an integration with ImageKit.io https://imagekit.io/ for this, so images are not only placed in the correct resolution but also immediately optimized and loaded as quickly as possible.

Too many points of interest?

On the basis of good tests, you can easily identify the most important performance issues for your website.

If you don't understand all those test results, get someone who does. Someone that has experience with them and knows how to improve those results so you get the desired speed.

Also consider a performance budget for your website. This helps to make better choices to ensure the speed you need.