Poor site performance and slow individual page load times can cause significant issues for your users and negatively affect your SEO strategy. Google has indicated that site speed and individual page speed are both contributing factors to search index rankings.
Pages with long load times create a poor user experience and can lead to higher bounce rates and a drop in conversions. Slow page speeds also affect a search engine’s ability to crawl your site for information quickly, leading to lower search rankings.
There are many ways to identify and improve poor site performance. Here are some of the common web performance bottlenecks that we’ve encountered, as well as a list of tools that you can use to test your website’s performance and page load times.
Common Causes of Web Performance Bottlenecks
We fix performance bottlenecks for client websites almost daily, and there are some common issues that we encounter often that are easily avoidable.
Image Dimensions and Image Optimization
Improper image dimensions and image quality are some of the most common issues we find when we’re checking a site’s performance. This issue can easily be resolved by resizing your images and optimizing them for the web.
Typically website graphics are 72-100 dots per inch, or dpi. Images that have been created by a designer are usually created at around 300dpi and need to be resized to avoid massive image file sizes and resizing the images with CSS.
If you work in Drupal, you can handle this sort of image resizing with Image Styles. Drupal 8 can also handle responsive images at different breakpoints.
