One of the most important aspects, whether to achieve good results in Google's organic search or to improve your site's conversion rate, is to pay close attention to performance. The loading time of a page determines not only the conversion rate of an e-commerce site but also a significant part of the qualification criteria for an ad in a Sponsored Links strategy, for example.
Optimizing your site's performance is essential, but how to do it? How to optimize performance and consequently achieve better results?
The optimization of your site will go through two fundamental steps:
Analysis and Optimization of Site Infrastructure
The performance of the server will always be a critical point regarding the optimization of a lead site or an eCommerce, but how to define the best structure for your site? The first point is to know who the people accessing your site are or, in terms of planning, when it comes to a new site or campaign, who are the people you want to reach with the optimization strategy. For example, if your target audience is generally "Users from Brazil."
Let’s say that having a server in the United States is not initially a good decision (of course, we must consider the lack of good data centers in Brazil), for a logical reason based on Moore's Law, we know that distance in a network will always affect the loading time of the site.
Another fundamental aspect that has been well addressed by the paradigm shift to the concept of Cloud Servers is the scaling of the resources needed to support your site's traffic and thus always adjusting the hosting server in terms of processor and memory to meet the demands of your users.
A good starting point for you to start optimizing your site would be to analyze the data from Google Analytics, within the "Behavior" dimension, Site Speed, we have a series of reports that help us analyze the page loading time and the server response time to identify within the reality of our users what most affects their experience.
Analysis and Optimization of Site Source Code
Regarding the optimization of the source code, there is a list of tools that can give you good help! Some tools are available online, such as Google Page Speed, and others like YSlow can be installed as browser plugins, all of them will have the main objectives:
- Compress textual code and reduce loading time of source code files of the pages;
- Compress images without loss of quality, also reducing the loading time of binary files;
- Improve the performance of client-side scripts, allowing not only faster loading of your site but also enabling it to run on any computer regardless of the number of services running on the user's computer.