Common Website Performance Mistakes
Is the performance of your website so slow that it may increase your bounce rate? The user experience on your website is a critical part of internet marketing. Having a sluggish website may negatively impact their entire user experience since it may take longer to find what they’re looking for.
According to research, 47% of consumers anticipate a website to load in less than two seconds. However, most people will wait 6-10 seconds before abandoning a page.
So to guide you through your website development process, here are the 5 most common website performance mistakes you need to take into account.
Image Optimisation
One of the most common errors individuals make is uploading overly huge photographs to their websites. All site photos should be optimised and, preferably, have the correct proportions shown. You can effectively measure your website’s performance using tools such as PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix, and these tools will assist you in identifying potentially troublesome photographs on your website.
Third-party Scripts
Third-party scripts severely reduce the website’s performance. Each third-party widget imposes a significant impact on the website’s overall performance. Third-party scripts are any scripts loaded from a domain other than your own.
Third-party scripts include a diverse range of alternative solutions, including the following:
- Allowing for web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel)
- Integrating chat widgets (e.g. Facebook)
- Video embedding (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo)
- Including buttons for social sharing
- Integrating commenting systems (e.g. Disqus)
- Embedding advertisements
- Review embedding
It’s often difficult to prevent them, but you must quantify their influence on your website’s performance to avoid the issue spiralling out of control.
Un-Optimised Code
This is the most serious performance issue that concerns the code itself. It’s not unusual to not minified JS or CSS. This issue is most noticeable on WordPress websites that use bloated themes. If your website is built around a large theme, up to 50% of the code loaded may be unnecessary.
Incompatible with mobile devices
Nowadays, everyone owns a mobile phone, and thus your website should be optimised for mobile use. Unfortunately, non-mobile-optimised websites typically have bloated graphics, unplayable videos, and irrelevant links.
And given that the average number of mobile users each day is five hours, it’s very safe to assume that most traffic to your site comes via mobile. What’s more striking is that modern brands have begun to humanise themselves. They do not operate as a brand but rather as individuals on social networking networks. As a result, most social connection with the brand occurs exclusively via mobile.
Servers that are too slow
While optimisation is desirable, there are situations when your server is at fault. Your web server may be the initial cause of contention. You can determine which web server your website is utilising by inspecting it. Although Apache was formerly the most common web server, there are now more performant alternatives.
