How to Optimize Your Website for Best Performance: Smart Tools and Techniques Part 1

Do you know that there are many website designers and developers out there in the market trying to create something unique for a wide variety of clientele base? Yes everybody needs a website.

In this skill based article, We would look at a very important aspect of a website which is “performance and speed” I am going to look at this guide with two(2) respect

A.  Some of the Metrics and Analytics you need to focus on in order to optimize your website for the best performance.

B.  Tools and Platforms that can help you accomplish it and also how to do some monitoring of your performance.

Before we go on  I will give you a bonus list: some top 10 reasons why your website may be very slow or boring to website visitors:

Here are our Top 10 Reasons for Slow Loading Websites.

Now before we begin optimizing our website for top performance its always good to have a benchmark or baseline for your website. Really you dont want to set the score yourself so when you are done with optimizing your website you can see how far you have improved on your performance.

There are (2) two amazing tools I use very often to check out websites that our inhouse team have developed: Pingdom Website Speed Test Tool and  Sucuri Global Performance Test Tool

The very good advantages of this test is that they give you a waterfall idea/picture of all the components of the website and what takes time to load as compared to other components

The CSS, JavaScript, HTML, images, external requests, any other type of request, and it gives a breakdown of how long that request takes to load and it also includes additional metrics such as the page load size and different breakdowns of that, and various other metrics that are helpful.

The second tool, the Sucuri Global Performance Testing Tool gives you three metrics from a lot of different locations around the world which is helpful when establishing that initial baseline as well. I mentioned three other tools: Gtmetrix, WebPageTest, and Google Pagespeed Insights as well. I recommend trying all the tools and then picking the two or three that work best for you in what you’re trying to accomplish.

Before you start optimizing your site for performance, I recommend going through and doing a spring cleaning, similar to what you would do in your house weekends, just go through and clean everything top to bottom. That’s what I recommend doing with your site as well.

First, before you get started, you want to make sure you take a full back up of your files and database. That way if anything goes wrong while you’re doing this, you have a back up to go to and you don’t have to worry about losing any data or having any issues. The other thing that I’ll mention is ideally you’re doing this in a staging or development environment and you’re not doing this in a production environment. So if something does go wrong, it’s not impacting your production site and it’s only on a staging or a testing site.

The next part is removing any inactive plugins or themes. Generally a habit that we see a lot is that if you aren’t using a plugin or theme, you may just deactivate it and leave it on your site. If you aren’t using it, remove it because that way it can’t be used as a possible attack vector when a potential attacker is trying to compromise your website, and it also can’t impact the performance as well because it’s totally removed. If you ever do need it later down the road, you can always reinstall it.

Continuing on with spring cleaning, you don’t want to have any backups on the server. Anything that isn’t needed for your production site to perform and function as it should. Often, for example, backups, generally having backups and storing them on the same server as your production environment is never good practice anyway because if something goes wrong on that production environment, well your backups are on the same server, thus you can’t rely on those normally because they will be impacted as well.

The next part is removing old subdomains, domains, anything that isn’t being used. You’ve had a server for a few years, you’ve probably had a few websites on it over time. You aren’t using one of those sites, remove it. If it’s outdated and you still are using it, you should update it. Then the next thing is you don’t want to use a production server as a development or staging server. As I mentioned when ideally optimizing your site for performance, you don’t want to do this on the production environment, the same thing goes with isolating the development and staging server from the production server. That’s just good development practice as well.

The last part here goes hand in hand with keeping backups of the site or server on the same server that your production environment is. You don’t need to store personal files or any files that aren’t needed for the production site to function. There’s a lot better ways to store backups and personal files than production server.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this write up!

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