How Website Maintenance Will Improve Website Performance

Websites are one of those things in life where slow speed kills – it kills user experience and negatively impacts SEO (i.e., where your website appears in search engine results). If your site takes more than two seconds to display its content after clicking, it will leave your visitors frustrated and they may abandon your website altogether.

It doesn’t matter if you have the exact product or service your potential customer is seeking. A poorly performing website will kill your search engine rankings, the amount of traffic coming to your site, the chance that traffic converts into paying customers, and your bottom line. Even if users decide to stick around, slow page load time will deter them from returning in the future.

So, how do you stop the torture your website users experience while waiting for your sluggish web pages to load? Let’s talk about what you should expect from a website maintenance company, and how we help our clients.

Improving Performance with Regular Website Maintenance

Website speed and performance optimization is an iterative exercise that continues over the lifespan of your website.

Website maintenance has an impact on your overall page speed and can improve the effectiveness of your website. An exceptional website maintenance company will perform many routine tasks that will help improve website performance, including:

• Monitor website performance and page speed cross-platform (on mobile and desktop devices), and fix any performance issues identified.
• Update the Content Management System or backend of your website on a regular basis.
• Monitor and perform website security scans, to ensure your website is not been hacked or effected by malware or outbound spam links.
• Monitor the website hosting environment, and mitigate any DDoS attacks that your website may be impacted by.
• Monitor website analytics to identify outliers and issues.

There are countless ways that your website load time and performance can be improved. In this article, we outline a few of the ways a website maintenance company can help. Some are iterative and ongoing, while others are one-time efforts.

Ditch Your Shared Hosting Company

Where your website is hosted and the type of server that hosts your website has the largest impact on your website performance. This fact is indisputable.

The worst performing websites are, more often than not, hosted in shared hosting environments. These “cheap” hosting services offer little value to your business.

How much are you saving with $10/month hosting when your visitors are enable to quickly load your website?

When your website is hosted on a server that shares CPU and memory resources with thousands of other websites, you can expect your website to load very, very slowly.

Even if you are not directly paying for shared hosting, there is a high chance that your website maintenance company is hosting your website in a shared hosting environment. We take a different approach to hosting.

Mackmedia focuses on website performance and security. Here are just some of the ways we improve website performance in our fully managed hosting environment, and how we differentiate ourselves from our competitors:

• Our client’s websites are hosted in a dedicated hosting environment, on servers we rent in collocated data centers. We don’t take the cheapest or most convenient route.
• Our goal is to ensure all of our clients’ websites are loading as quickly as possible, in as few as 100-300ms (milliseconds) for the first response from our server.
• When we identify slow performing websites, we rent more servers and move high resource consuming websites to different servers. Basically, we make sure each server is performing well and is not over-utilized.
• Our hosting environment is tiered – it consists of hardware load balancers, hardware cache servers, and separate Apache and MySQL database servers. Our load balancers and cache servers are configured to handle incredibly high sessions and requests per second.
• We filter out junk traffic from countries that are responsible for a vast majority of hacking incidents.
• Our data centers have integrated Anti-DDoS protection and do not impose traffic or bandwidth restrictions.

Nearly all of our clients (before becoming part of the Mackmedia family) where hosted in a shared hosting environments. How many of these websites were performing poorly, as slow as 7-10 seconds? How many did we dramatically improve website performance (by as much as thousands of percentage points)? Every single one. Once we moved them into our fully managed and dedicated hosting environment, these same websites fully load in under a second.

Optimizing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

Decreasing the number of requests exchanged between a browser and web server is one of the most impactful optimizations a website maintenance company can make.

Every round trip HTTP/S request between a browser and server takes time, often adding seconds to the overall time is takes to “paint” the website in a browser. Even if each round trip request takes only a couple hundred milliseconds, when the browser makes 150 requests it may increase your page load time by 5-10 seconds (or more).

Website maintenance companies will review CSS, JavaScript and HTML resources to identify areas to reduce the total number of requests. If this exercise has not been performed previously, these are the most common optimizations that can be made:

• CSS and JavaScript can be minified, combined and compressed. Our clients often have website that load 100+ resources, and these can minified and combined into a few as 3 resources.
• HTML minification and compression can be implemented, which can reduce the size of the page and improve load time without any negative side effects.

Optimizing Images for the Web

Images account for a large portion of a website’s load time, and regular maintenance ensures that all your images are optimized to download as quickly as possible under varying conditions, such as slow mobile networks.

Your website may be using stock photos or images that are large and bloated, and are not optimized for websites. They can be resized or compressed so your visitors won’t be downloading files that are larger than necessary.

The number of images on each page of your website increases load time. Regular website maintenance can reduce the amount of data transferred to load your website (without changing what can be seen) by making the pictures smaller or reducing the resolution and compression.

Optimizing Plug-ins to Improve Page Speed

The number and quality of plug-ins on your website can also result in less than ideal load time. Here are some ways that plug-ins can negatively impact your website:

• Every plug-in that is added to your website backend increases the number of lines of code your web server will execute in order to load pages..
• Poorly written plug-ins or unnecessary plug-in may decrease your page load time.
• Plug-ins may hog server or browser resources, and they can often be replaced with light-weight alternatives to speed up page load time.

Website maintenance companies will regularly review plug-ins installed on your website, and provide recommendations to consolidate, remove, or use replace plugins.

Optimizing Externally Loaded Resources

External resources can increase the amount of time it takes to load your website. This includes Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel. There are correct ways to load external resources, and poor coding or incorrect usage can dramatically decrease your visitor’s user experience.

An experienced website maintenance company will review externally loaded resources, and ensure they are loaded asynchronously or differed when possible.

Using Responsive Design

An experienced website maintenance company will test your website to ensure images and text automatically scale to appear quickly and properly on any screen size. This is called responsive design, and it can ensure that the page load time is as low as possible on both mobile devices and desktop platforms.

With responsive design, there’s no need to scroll or pinch-zoom to read text or view images, or dig through buried menus or search for navigational links that might otherwise be hidden.

 

Website maintenance is complicated and requires an extensive amount of technical experience (to do it correctly). It is one of the most overlooked areas, yet it is critical to your business– the wrong company can impact your business in ways that are hard to directly attribute but directly impact your revenue.

Contact us to learn how we can help manage and maintain your website, the right way!