Launching my website this week, I’ve had 5 days to get stuck in first-hand doing a week’s worth of optimisations. I’m no stranger to this workflow, it’s part of my everyday job being a website designer and developer, but I also know not a lot of this is common knowledge.
This will be a multi-part series detailing the work that went on behind the scenes to improve my website’s experience for you, the user, and how you can replicate similar results for yourself.
How Do I Know When To Optimise My Website?
More often than not, you can feel it. It’s slow and sluggish, and although you have Fibre Broadband, it seems to be taking that little bit longer than everywhere else. A telltale sign I swear by is opening Dev Tools (F12) in your browser and navigating to the “Network” tab. Here you can see some settings to enable, specifically the “Disable cache” checkbox and “No throttling” select dropdown.
Let’s experiment right now. Open Dev Tools (right click > inspect), head to the Network tab, turn on Disable cache, choose “Fast 3G” throttling, and reload the page. Is it a pleasant experience? I hope so, as this is ~60% of your customer’s experience. If it doesn’t feel great, you could be missing opportunities and improvements need to be made!
What Online Tools Can Help Diagnose Website Performance Issues?
PageSpeed Insights (Free) and Lighthouse (Paid option available) are two great options for diagnosing the performance of your website.
Both of these tools give your website a Score out of 100 in 4 Key Areas; Performance (speed and responsiveness), Accessibility (readability and visual colour contrast), Best Practices (what you should be doing, hopefully!) and SEO (search engine optimisation). These four key areas have an array of thresholds to meet, and exploring the full report will alert you to areas that need attention.
You want to aim for 100 in all areas, but as a website developer myself, being just shy of full marks is more realistic. When I built my website, a lot of these factors were already in mind, so I was already hitting high marks for Performance, Best Practices and SEO – and with some small tweaks to some JavaScript plugins I was using, I also improved my Accessibility Score to ensure those visually-impaired can also enjoy visiting my website as much as anyone else.
My Website Has A Low-Performance Score, Now What?
If you’re equipped to deal with the Orange scores, I recommend getting stuck in as soon as possible. Follow along with the report and make amendments where needed. Return to test your site over and over until you’re happy you’ve done everything at your disposal to improve.
If you’re not equipped to tackle this alone, you’re hitting the Reds, or the long list of recommendations is too daunting, it’s time to invest in a better website. With 15 years of experience in designing and developing websites in PHP and WordPress, I’m here to assist.
Get in touch today to see how I can help. Whether it’s optimising and improving your current website to the latest best practices, removing excess unnecessary WordPress plugins you’ve accrued over the years, or developing an entirely new website – I’d love to collaborate with you to deliver something you’d be proud of again.
