Having a well-designed website is extremely crucial for businesses hoping to enter the online landscape. But, the responsibility does not end after the website has been designed and made live. It is vital that the website is properly optimised for the search engines; otherwise, users will not be able to find the website. Also, in order to beat strife online competition, the website should be user-friendly, easy to navigate and intuitive.

But, quite often, in the process of creating a website, business owners are so focused on getting the design and content right that they often forget the most fundamental element that ensures more website traffic - speed. This is where website performance optimisation comes in. If your website has a high bounce rate and it is not bringing you enough revenue, you need to avail website SEO services in Sheffield to boost the speed and performance of your website. Some of the techniques implemented by professionals are given below.

Reduce HTTP requests

In general, the more HTTP requests your website receives, the slower it will load. A browser is limited to opening a certain number of simultaneous connections to a single host. In order to prevent bottlenecks, the number of individual elements of a page needs to be reduced by using resource consolidation so that smaller files like, images can be bundled together into a single file. This helps to reduce HTTP requests and also the number of round trips that are needed to load a webpage.

Minify JavaScript and CSS

Minification of resources refers to the removal of unnecessary characters from your JavaScript, HTML and CSS that are not needed to load like, new line characters, white space characters, block delimiters and comments. This helps to speed up the webpage load time as it decreases the amount of code that has to be requested from the server.

Optimisation of images

Users expect a webpage to load fast and the maximum amount of time that they will wait for your website to load is under 3 seconds. If the webpage is slower than that, users will simply bounce and land on your competitor’s website. This is why it is vital that you take measures to optimise the images found on your website. In most cases, a website loads slowly because a lot of time takes to download the images, which adversely impacts the user experience.

Of course, high-quality images on your website is also crucial as it helps to drive engagement and also makes a website appear attractive. But, you need to optimise the images so that they do not take long to download.

301 redirects

301 redirects must be avoided whenever possible as they are performance killers. Redirects tend to generate additional round-trip times; therefore, quickly increases the time that is required to load the initial HTML document before the browser starts to even load the other assets.

Use a CDN

A CDN (content delivery network) helps to transfer the static files to a server that is close to the users. This helps the webpages to load faster. If you have a large website, a CDN is suitable for performance and speed optimisation. It will help in the fast delivery of webpages and content to the server at the location of the Internet users. Nowadays, more and more websites are making use of CDNs in order to enhance the speed of their website and provide the audience with better user experience.

These are a few of the techniques that professional providers of website SEO services in Sheffield implement in order to optimise the performance and speed of websites. However, not all tactics might be applicable for your website and this is why you need to arrange for a consultation with a reputed company. SEO professionals will be able to tell you the techniques that will help your website thrive in the online landscape after conducting a thorough audit.