Gone are the days when design supersedes performance in web design and development. Today, web designers have taken the “less is more” approach to web design. On the other hand, users are looking for instant response and expect your website to load instantly without any hiccups. That is why New York Website Design Company focuses more on improving your website performance. Here are 4 tips from web performance analyst Henri Helvetica that will help you supercharge your website performance.

  1. Get Rid of Extra Baggage

According to Henri Helvetica, the design decisions you will affect the performance of your website, it could be in a positive way or in a negative way. Dig deeper and develop an understanding of events that take place when your website load. He suggests, “Make sure you keep your SVGs as complexity free as possible. You will have less code when you render your SVG. I hear this from developers all the time. They’ll get an SVG from the designers and have to send it back because it would affect performance.” Look for extra elements on your website that can be eliminated to speed up your website load times.

  1. Compare With Others

Do you want to know how your website fare against others in your industry when it comes to page load times? Many tools can help you analyze multiple metrics, drill down into data, and show you how you stack up against others. This will give you a clear picture about where you stand in terms of website performance.

DevTools has a brilliant performance tool called WebPageTest that provide comprehensive data as well as incremental screenshots of browser rendering a website, which shows you how each asset on the website loads. Helvetica says, “Once you connect the dots, you can explore how to improve the user experience by bringing these assets into the viewport faster,”

  1. Optimize Multimedia

High-resolution images, videos, graphics and animations can play an important role in bringing your website load times down to a crawl. Although, you cannot eliminate them altogether but what you can do is to optimize images, videos, animations, graphics and other visual element on your website to make them load without any lag.

Apart from optimizations, Helvetica consider other metrics as well including Page Weight. “I would always take account of your page weight , That page weight will also be the victim of your network, because a cellular network can never really be predicted. So you want to make sure your assets are small and optimized for the viewport, which means you shouldn’t be able to see any desktop-size assets on a mobile device”

  1. Measure and Improve

Measure the right metrics and use the power of data to improve on areas of your website weakness. Helvetica explains, “Once you have your measurements and data laid out, you have to figure out what important elements to measure. You could have two pages that load in nine seconds, but one may have the viewport filled in much quicker, so you have a better user experience. You have to measure what is important in the load process for your site and your commercial enterprise. Think about what’s important for your users to interact with. Every site has its own individual needs ”

Google Chrome DevTools shows you how and when each element loads and what events are executred. Despite all that, very few developers use it, which is ironic to say the least. You do not need any other tool as Chrome DevTools tell you everything you need to know about what is slowing your website down. Helvetica says, “DevTools is a bit like a smoke detector. If there’s a fire, DevTools will tell you. It will at least show you where the smoke is.”

How do you enhance the speed of your website? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.