Today in business, the name of the game is customer service. If you keep your customer happy then chances are good that your business will be successful. Now obviously, in the digital age, a website is the primary way that customers relate to your brand and service, and in order to please your customer your website needs to be in tip-top shape.
We’ve all heard the stats on the rise of e-commerce and especially mobile commerce in the past decades. After all, if you strolled into a brick-and-mortar business and found it be missing key merchandise and with little or no customer service, how long would you stick around? The same point applies to your website; it absolutely must be running as fast and efficiently as possible. Conversely, when a site is buggy, visitors are going to vote with their fingers and “scroll” to the next place to do business, plain and simple.
Industry experts suggest that downtime can cost as much as $7900 per minute. That’s a staggering $474,000/hour! Obviously, a down website results in lost time and money, not to mention frustrated customers. You should aim for uptime 99.99% of the time.
Related Article: Simple Ways to Get More Customers from Your Website
In order to be mindful of the importance of continuous operations, let’s walk through 7 best practices that you should adopt in order to avoid poor website performance.
1. Check Your Web Hosting
When reviewing web performance, one of the first things to check is your web hosting service. It’s surprising how many times this gets overlooked. Even though your provider may offer you unlimited bandwidth, does that mean shared service with other sites that ends up affecting your own web performance? Are you frequently experiencing downtime or bandwidth issues? If so, it’s worthwhile to review your hosting options to ensure you’re getting the most efficient service. Don’t be afraid to insist on 99.99% uptime.
2. Reduce Image Size
Remember, customers are in a hurry and don’t have a long time to wait for websites to load up. So the more you optimize your front-end, the better your performance and overall user experience will be. One place to start is with your image size. According to the HTTP Archive, 61 percent of a website’s page weight on a desktop computer is images. Make sure that your images are appropriately sized. Adopting new image formats, such as WebP and JPeg XR, can also help reduce image weight by 20 to 50 percent without sacrificing quality.
3. Try a CDN
A content delivery network, or CDN, is a way of taking a website’s static files, like CSS, images, and JavaScript, and delivering them through web servers that are closer to the user’s physical location. Shorter proximity amounts to faster load time and ultimately better performance. But another benefit is that by offloading the bandwidth you also get less risk of downtime disruptions due to traffic volumes. Every way you look at it a CDN is a win-win for uptime.
4. Compress JavaScripts & Load Asynchronously
JavaScript is a big part of web development today and increasingly websites rely on this code to run as efficiently as possible. One trick is to compress your JavaScript files. Doing so will remove extra spaces to shrink file size and ultimately improve load time. Another strategy is to think about loading any of your third party JavaScripts asynchronously. Websites today are increasingly integrated with third party content: social media, chat features, commenting services, information feeds, and others. So if you load async, then in the event the third-party crashes, your page won’t be held up trying to load that resource. Async loading can also speed up page loads.
5. Improve DNS
Domain Name System, or DNS, is an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses. DNS is often overlooked, since it’s an attribute of your website host. But it shouldn’t be ignored because if DNS is down then your site won’t work. It would be worthwhile to check with your host about upgrading from standard to premium DNS services to ensure an automatic failover to other servers on the network if the closest server goes down.
6. Build Redundancy into Your Website
Another step to take in guaranteeing continual uptime is to invest in a DDoS mitigation platform. This kind of service can optimize and scale up your infrastructure if you experience a DDOS (distributed denial of service attack). The way it works is by redirecting your web traffic to the platform server farms so that your site keeps on running in spite of being under attack.
7. Adopt cloud-based website monitoring
No technique for optimizing your uptime is as powerful as that of a quality website monitoring service. It’s impossible to manually do this, but thanks to the cloud there are services now available that will keep metrics on your site 24/7. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a monitoring service keeping an eye on your site for you? How about having a service notify you of any downtime events that are in progress instead of discovering it too late? Better yet, what about knowing in advance when there’s a performance drop so you can save the sales you would otherwise lose from downtime? These are all the advantages with hiring a reliable web monitoring provider to watch over your site. There are any number of high quality providers out there to choose from today. If you haven’t tried out a 24/7 web monitoring service, then sign up today and give yourself the peace of mind you deserve.
In this age of instant updates, same-day delivery, and rapid technology changes, visitors simply are not going to wait very long for your website to load. You need to provide your customers with optimal performance while remembering that the primary point of your site is to make them happy and build revenue for your business. By going through the 7 points above, you’ll ensure that your website is optimized and running as fast and efficiently as possible. Your customers will thank you with many happy returns!
Author: Marieta Hovhannisyan is a digital marketing specialist for Monitis IT systems monitoring platform. She regularly writes about latest tech news, specifically topics such as cloud computing, IT systems monitoring and big data.
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