What is Site Performance

Site performance refers to the availability and speed of the website. Speed indicates how quickly a site can be loaded when a web browser makes a request. Availability is the percentage of tomes site can be accessed, and it also refers to uptime or reliability of the website.

Importance of Site performance

From the perspective of web traffic, if the website is loads slowly and frequently unavailable, it will result in unhappy users. Website visitors are end customers, and disappointed visitors will not return to the website. Today, we live in the digital era, and there is an increase in mobile devices that accounts for approximately half of the internet traffic. Search engines like Google are aware of these facts and have made speed an essential consideration in their rankings. Today, Google penalizes sites that are slow at search engine ranking. Globally, 90% of search traffic is handled by Google; hence it is significant for website owners.

What Affects Website Performance

The overall weight of a website depends on many images, moving parts, external resources, and codes. Based on this fact, it can be said that sites made of only text will load faster as compared to sites that have many images. Some of the factors that affect the site performance are:

Caching

Caching is to hold data in memory to improve performance. Data in memory can be processed quickly when web applications keep high-priority data in memory. This data acts as a snapshot of the website, which can be served promptly when requested.

DNS Lookup

The resolving time of website DNS differs depending on the provider. One of the elements that can be used to make up server response speed is DNS Lookup. The level of performance varies for each DNS provider. For instance, much better performance can be gained through Cloudflare DNS providers than the performance level of GoDaddy.

Multimedia

Plain text and code are smaller in size as compared to images and videos. A properly optimized full-page image is likely to take 80KB to 100KB space, while a full page of plain texts needs as little as 4KB space.

External resources

Suppose the third party is being used by the site for services. In that case, it might increase latency because the server needs additional time to communicate when loading the site along with another server to load the services from that site to your site.

Additional Site Functions / Plugins

A famous content management system that powers above 30% of all websites are WordPress. It allows users to substitute coding knowledge with plugins, and it is easy to use. One drawback of WordPress is that it is open-source so that anyone can contribute to the plugin pool. Hence plugin pool differs significantly in terms of quality as both professional and amateur developers can use it for coding. To enhance performance, websites use third=party add-ons; hence they can fall prey to plugin syndrome even if the website is not run on WordPress. Site speed can reduce significantly and be exposed to security risks due to the overabundance use of the plugin.