In today’s information age, it is not a good idea to overlook website performance as it has direct impact on the business revenues. Most of the internet users expect the website pages to load within first one or two seconds and if the response is delayed even for a fraction of second, they will just move to another competitor’s site. In fact, many online shoppers who are not happy with the website response are less likely to visit the same website again, no matter how tempting the bargain could be. Yet, webmasters don’t realize the importance of performance and stuff their websites with complex designs and functionality which delay and impact the response times.
There are many factors that affect the website performance but lets us discuss few of them that are important:
- Complicated functional design
Website performance is important to establish and maintain a guaranteed user experience. Sometimes, too much functionality added to the websites make the performance suffer. Modern day applications need to be more adaptive and responsive to multiple platforms, because many of them are designed using complex technical tools and third party plug-ins. Issues with page loads generally depend on all resources of the page like images, css, javascript, number of back-end server requests through queries etc. Even the back-end infrastructures have become more complex as many of them are getting migrated to dynamic cloud architectures. Hence the entire thing is making it hard for the website owners to analyze the root cause for any performance issue.
- Technical dependencies
Website performance also depends on factors like server connectivity, protocols, existing computer resources etc. Sometimes, even the optimized websites experience downtime due to defective servers from the hosting plan, high volume to the websites, and the usage of outdated software. By timely monitoring the uptime at regular intervals there is a possibility that you can control the performance issues and website downtime disasters.
- Scaling up for higher demands
Number of hits or high traffic is a good sign for business websites because more number of people accessing the website means higher conversions and more business profits. But imagine what happens if high volume of users try to access single website at the same time. This happens mainly for the e-commerce websites during peak hours when huge sale is going on. As the number of requests to access the website increases, the server slows down and eventually the website performance becomes very slow. It even results in server crash making the website unavailable to the users. The reason could be the limited bandwidth because most of the websites are hosted with certain bandwidth limit and any excess downloads may result in low website performance.
- website monitoring service
Anticipating what went wrong with the website is not an easy task as it could be anything – delayed network, caching problem or even a database error. Hence, it is always better to have a good service provider for website monitoring who can track the working of your websites, analyze the reason if there are any failures and alert you promptly through phone or SMS in case of performance issues. Keeping track of your website and monitoring its performance ensures continuous availability of your website without unexpected downtime, and fast retrieval of pages at consistent speed giving a smooth internet experience to the visitors.