Evaluate your website’s performance
Regardless of the time zone, the peak traffic interval is usually between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. That’s when people come home, have dinner, and sit at their computers or devices.
If your website has a high and consistent number of visitors, peak traffic can be up to five times the average daily traffic.
Before you can optimize performance, you need to assess it. Evaluate factors such as server response times, page load times, and overall responsiveness.
Load testing identifies capacity limits and performance bottlenecks, allowing you to address them in advance. It also shows how your website performs under stress.
Use free Google tools to enhance speed
Google Chrome’s Developer Tools still offer reliable performance testing functions in 2024. You can access them by right-clicking on the page, choosing “Inspect,” and then going to “Performance.” Here, you can see how your pages load and identify components causing delays.
Google PageSpeed Insights is another free and very helpful tool. It works by assessing your web page content. It scores the performance of the mobile and the desktop version and shows you how you can optimize both versions. Mobile optimization should not be overlooked because more and more traffic to websites is coming from mobile users.
Considering switching the type of hosting
If you use shared hosting, consider upgrading to cloud hosting or a VPS to handle increased loads. Both solutions are increasingly viable. The cloud market saw 34% growth in the first quarter of 2022, and the VPS hosting market is expected to exceed $8 billion by 2026.
Alternatively, work with your host to optimize caching and server configurations.
Reduce image size and choose the format carefully
On average, people read 28% of the words on a webpage at most. Appealing visual content can lead to a 400% increase of traffic to your website. Images contribute the most to page size, and they are among the easiest to optimize for speed.
Reduce the size of the image before uploading it. Scaling down images after uploading them increases load times. Compress them using tools like Paint that reduce the size but not the quality.
PNG format is best for images that need to be transparent, while JPEG is best for photos with lots of colors.
Minify or write shorter CSS
Minifying CSS involves eliminating unnecessary comments, characters, spaces, and other elements that the server doesn’t need to process the code. As there’s less data to transmit, this CSS or JavaScript version loads much faster.
It’s even better to write clear, concise code in advance. The principle of “Don’t Repeat Yourself” or DRY advocates for this exactly. CSS involves repeating the same properties, so you should identify and consolidate them to eliminate redundancies.
How does this work in practice? Let’s say your h1 and your h2s have the same color and font size. You can group them instead of declaring them separately for each selector. This makes future updates easier and streamlines your stylesheet.
Final thoughts
To evaluate performance, look at overall site responsiveness, page load times, and server response times. Google Chrome’s Developer Tools and Google PageSpeed Insights help improve speed. Your performance during peak traffic times will benefit from more robust hosting.
Reduce image size before you upload images, not after. Compressing images also helps performance, as does removing unnecessary spaces, characters, comments, and other elements from the CSS. When writing it, stick to the DRY principle.
If you follow these tips, your website’s performance will improve.
