As a result, your website needs to be high-quality if you want to beat your competitors. However, not only it has to provide value and look great, but also needs to perform up to par. If your site is slow to load or is incredibly messy or laggy, people will be unlikely to stick around. They will often migrate to your competitor, which could cost you a lot of money and business.
So it is important that your site runs well, doesn’t lag and loads quickly. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done as there are many variables that can lead to bad site performance. This includes errors, large amounts of traffic, unoptimized content, and more. With that in mind, this article is going to take a look at a few different tools that you can use to help increase the performance of your website.
Monitoring tools
While improving the performance of your site is great, you should also try to find out why the performance is struggling in the first place. In order to do that, you should be utilizing at least one type of monitoring tools. There is a wide range of tools that can be used such as log monitoring, analytics monitoring, and networking monitoring. Free network monitoring tools are also great and they can provide you with a ton of value without breaking the bank.
These tools will alert you when an error or a specific event occurs, and they may even let you know how to fix it. Without using these tools you may not be aware of why your site is performing poorly, which will limit your ability to fix the issue.
Use a CDN or a load balancer
As we briefly mentioned earlier, having too much traffic on your site can often be a major cause of performance issues. This is because your single server is overloaded with requests, so it takes longer to respond to them and provide people access to your site. One thing that many companies may consider doing to rectify this is using a content delivery network (CDN).
CDNs use a principle called load balancing to help your site stay perfectly functional. Load balancing involves distributing your traffic over a number of different servers, instead of overloading one with requests. This eases the load on your website and will allow you to maintain a suitable speed despite the increased traffic. While these can sometimes be fairly expensive, they are a proven and reliable way to keep your website performing appropriately.
Ensure it is optimized for mobile audiences
Just because your site runs and performs well on a desktop computer or laptop, don’t automatically assume it will run as well on a mobile device. If your site isn’t specifically optimized or designed with mobile in mind, there is a good chance the user experience will be subpar.
And with over half of the world’s internet traffic coming from mobile devices, this is more important than ever. There is a better chance someone is viewing your site on a mobile phone or tablet than a computer, so make sure it looks good. This can be done by using a reliable host, a responsive theme, redesigning pop-ups and more. Of course, don’t forget to test your site on different devices as well.
Hopefully, this article has been helpful when it comes to bettering the performance of your website.
This is a guest post by Fatima Ishfaq.