In this article, we will discuss important points that should be considered to improve the website performance and its impacts.
Introduction
The main objective of this article is to discuss why it is important to improve the website performance and its impacts are if it is ignored.
Background
Ok now the first and foremost important question to all is why it is important for us to create high performance, scalable websites which will match the likes of the market giants like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo!, Twitter and Amazon.
To answer to this question let me ask you one more question like “How do you feel when you experience a long waiting time when you try to open a website from your mobile to book ticket early in the morning?” You feel frustrated and also nervous thinking about the remaining tickets count. At that moment you try other alternative sites and possible ways for booking the ticket.
The above scenario is a simple example describing about the consequences poor performance of the website. As a developer we feel very bad if someone puts questions against our website performance. Now we must be serious enough and put our thought process in the lines of optimizing the website performance.
Every company wishes their site should shine as bright as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo!, Twitter, and Amazon.
Steve Souder’s, from Google, described the Performance Golden Rule as mentioned below:
80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend.
Start there.
Hence as per the above rule it becomes important for the developers to consider the front-end of the website as the first and foremost candidate to undergo through performance optimization process.
Taking appropriate measures to boost the front-end performance of the website will in turn reduce the end user response times.
What are the impacts if performance of the website is not considered as a serious threat?
Assume that out website is hosted by a hosting provider company and we need to do the payment based on the bandwidth consumed by our website.
Open chrome browser and browse the website. Now open the Developer Tools option of the chrome browser and navigate to the Network tab and refresh the webpage once more. You can see the components getting downloaded whenever a web page is rendered. The more number of components associated with the webpage more is the download and hence bandwidth consumed is also more. In short payment to the hosting provider directly depends on the bandwidth consumed by the website. If by any means we are able to reduce the number of requests served from the website then we are saving the end user and company money too.
Now-a-days users are accustomed to the speedy web pages. In this modern internet age there is already faster internet connection speed and better hardware available, hence the end users always expect a certain level of speed whenever they access a webpage. If they don’t see any speed then they look for the alternatives and this in turn causes loss in business for the company.
Website performance also impacts the search rankings of the website. Google’ search engine team considers speed of the website for setting up the search rankings. Even if you have implemented the best SEO practices in your website, its slow performance contributes to the fall in the search rankings.
With increase in mobile devices in the market, mobile internet usage is also increasing a lot these days. Everybody expects website to be ubiquitous in nature (i.e. website can be accessed anywhere, anytime and using any device). Users are always looking for various schemes and offers to reduce their cost incurred for their internet usage. Less number of downloads while accessing the website will save lot of money from the end user perspective.
In order to serve the multiple request and control the high traffic, it is common practice to host the websites in a web farm environment. The electricity consumption and maintenance cost for the hosting environment depends on the number of webservers used in the web farm environment. Hence if we are able to reduce the server load then in that case we may not need extra server.
In order to avoid all the impacts described above, we can now conclude that optimizing the website performance needs to considered seriously which in turn will benefit both the end users and company a lot.
Conclusion
so far we have discussed about the things that are important to improve the website performance and its impacts. Hope these are some helpful tips.
Thanks for Reading,