How to Improve Website Page Speed and Turn Visitors into Customers
There’s nothing that frustrates users more than a preloader that keeps spinning, and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) websites are certainly not immune to this blight.
In this article, our digital experience experts will give you several practical tips on how to improve website speed, which is crucial to customer engagement and retention. We’ll discuss the top front-end issues pulling your site away from the search engines’ immediate reach and include practical fixes to help you improve website page speed and keep visitors engaged.
How to Improve Website Page Speed By Solving Critical Front-End Issues
Issue 1. Eliminate Redundant HTML
HTML is the foundation necessary to display all website assets, such as images, videos, and content, through the use of tags. Simply put, the longer the HTML code, the more time it will take to load.
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Solution:
To ramp up your website’s speed, minify and compress HTML code as much as possible.
Issue 2. Format Images
Images entice website visitors to stay on your pages longer, but those would-be customers will head for the hills if the images load too slowly. Unoptimized images will drag down your website page performance, resulting in lower engagement. The most common issues are:
- image formats with large file sizes
- absence of lazy loading
- wrong cache lifetime settings
- image sizes that don’t match mobile devices
- small images that are not combined into a sprite
- uncompressed SVG images injected inline
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Solution:
Format images in WEBP instead of using the image source file like PNG, JPEG, or GIF. Reduce wait time with lazy loading so content is only rendered when users are actually looking at it. And, make sure you resize image assets for mobile devices.
Issue 3. Optimize Videos
Unoptimized videos are deadweight, draining web resources. Without proper compression, your website page performance simply won’t cut the mustard.
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Solution:
Optimize your website videos for the web and use compression – and pick a video format compatible with all the popular browsers. Apply lazy loading for videos so that browsers spend resources only when users actually click and watch them.
Issue 4. Reduce JavaScript and CSS Redundancy
Redundant JavaScript and CSS files slow downloading speeds. The same holds true for non-minified JavaScript code. We’ve found that developers sometimes skip prioritizing JavaScript and CSS loading sequences, causing website page performance issues. Non-critical files will load first, which takes up precious time.
Finally, huge amounts of unstructured CSS and JavaScript code take up most of the rendering capacity, worsening website page speed. Web developers can choose to put the entire website’s code into one big JavaScript file instead of splitting code into chunks or loading chunks of code on demand.
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Solution:
If you’re left wondering how to improve website page speed, apply minification for JavaScript and CSS code. Prioritize what loads first and logically break JavaScript into separate files.
Issue 5. Use the Right Font Formats
Unless configured correctly, some fonts can hamper page performance and even compromise the look and feel of your website. You can see this when you first open a site, and uncached fonts flicker as they re-render.
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Solution:
Reduce font file sizes by using the WOFF2 format and font subsets. WOFF2 offers better compression, resulting in smaller and faster-loading files. Font subsets include only the characters used on your site, avoiding the unnecessary data transfer that comes with full font files.
Issue 6. Get the Right Server and Client-Side Rendering Ratio
Choosing where to render content greatly impacts performance and user experience. Broadly speaking, you can either render server-side (SSR), where content is prepped and delivered from the server before being sent to a browser, or client-side (CSR) when content is delivered in chunks and rendered in a browser.
Choosing SSR, CSR or a hybrid will depend on:
- your users’ devices
- how content is matched to given media
- your business goals
Each approach has pros and cons. In our experience, developers often choose a method they’re more familiar with or one that is currently trending—and this might cost you dearly. They’re not necessarily answering the question of how to improve website speed, but rather, what’s the solution that I am most familiar with?
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Solution:
Adopt a hybrid approach, balancing SSR with CSR, and optimizing for speed. Before finalizing your development plan, you should test the approach, measure the speed, and make adjustments as needed.
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Issue 7. Test for Load Reliability
Web experiences are usually tested in a limited environment before rolling out a website or a major upgrade. Once the site is live, it’ll be inundated with visitors, search crawlers, and content scrapers. You may even fall victim to cyber attacks.
Over time, your website page speed will gradually deplete. Eventually, you can even experience downtime because your server has run out of memory or space.
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Solution:
Before rolling out major website upgrades, conduct a proper load-testing session that simulates multiple users interacting with your website simultaneously. Employ a content delivery network (CDN) to leverage servers closer to your target audience, thus reducing load time.
When you collect and analyze visitor statistics, you can upscale or downscale the website’s infrastructure. You can also tune the infrastructure before launching a new campaign, entering a new market, or approaching a given sales season. Additionally, you can set up logging and incident alerts within your system to help you address issues immediately.
Issue 8. Get Rid of Long Content Publishing
Often overlooked, webpage rotation speed is key to your website’s performance. AEM is a powerful platform, but gets very complicated when creating, translating and publishing complex web pages. It can leave you stumped when facing the common dilemma— how to improve website page load speed.
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Solution:
Get your development team to use advanced authoring tools to automate routine tasks and improve code creation and content publishing. The Exadel Authoring Kit is an open-source tool for managing AEM Sling models and structured data, and modifying AEM component policy. Develop publishing strategies using component-based pages, content and experience fragments, and Adobe’s new Edge Delivery Services.
Issue 9. Poor Coding Practices
Working code doesn’t make for excellent website page speed — but high-quality code does!
Regardless of the back-end or front-end implementation in AEM, error-prone and extensive code:
- increases support costs
- complicates developing new features
- creates bottlenecks at unexpected times
- fails in high-load conditions
- must be revised and rewritten
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Solution:
Review your code before every feature release using code linting. Code linting combines tools and processes for code analysis to detect inconsistencies, errors, readability issues, and poor code quality across a codebase.
Ensure the most critical code bits get thorough unit and integration test coverage. See if resources are being reused when needed and properly disposed of to avoid memory leaks. Check you’re using appropriate tools for dependency and data injection operations. Monitor your infrastructure for memory and bandwidth usage.
Page Speed: The First Step to Better Engagement
Speed is crucial. Studies show you have just 3 seconds to engage users before they leave your website. Make sure your site loads fast, so users don’t leave fast!
Front-end implementations may be helpful for your team, but critical back-end issues play a major role in optimizing for speed.
That is why we recommend reading our recent article about AEM back-end performance issues and how to fix them.
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