Top tips for building a high-performance website

Aaron, UX Designer:

Enhancing the user experience and optimizing usability with clear and easy-to-use navigation is fundamental to engaging users and improving website performance. Fast loading times and responsive design are key components of good UX; they reduce bounce rates and improve performance as users are more likely to stay on a site that loads quickly and operates smoothly. Easy wins are ensuring that primary calls-to-action are noticeable with high-contrast buttons and designing labels and CTAs that prompt action.

 

Sam, Front-end Developer:

My top tip would be to minify your markup and use DRY CSS (Do Not Repeat CSS) ensure all markup is actually being used and if not, it doesn't need to be there. I always make sure that client-side files and assets such as videos and images are compressed. If you perform audits regularly to monitor the performance after launch, you can keep on top of maintenance much easier. At Absolute, we have dedicated developer time each month as part of our ongoing maintenance agreement which means we are always looking at the site and finding ways to optimise.

 

Josh, Back-end Developer

CDNs help make your website load faster by storing copies of your content in different locations around the world. This way, when someone visits your site, they get the content from a server that's close to them, which reduces loading times. This is especially useful for images and videos that a lot of people are accessing.

Caching is a technique that stores frequently used data so that it doesn't have to be fetched from the server every time. This means your site can show content faster and handle more visitors without slowing down. We talked about caching in our Why Website Performance is Important in 2024 article, where we explained how it helps reduce server load and speed up your site.

Scale Your Servers. As more people visit your website, you'll need more servers to handle the extra traffic. Using services that offer auto-scaling can automatically add or remove servers based on how much traffic your site is getting. This keeps your website running smoothly even when there are sudden spikes in visitors.

By using CDNs, setting up caching, and scaling your servers, you can make sure your website runs quickly and efficiently for all your users.

 

Gemma, Head of Digital

Display only what’s needed and optimise your content! Often there is a temptation to overload a site and display everything. My advice would be to only show what’s needed on a webpage for that user, at that point in their journey. For example, if your site contains lots of product information, you don’t need to display all of the attributes as you’ll be pulling in all the data to all products. Consider what information is really necessary for the user. A site can also get bloated and slow when displaying every possible image at full resolution. Select the priority images and optimise your assets. Large, uncompressed images can significantly slow down page load times and make the navigation experience frustrating.

If you need help with your current website, or perhaps you need a powerful CMS to drive your digital presence forward. Get in touch with the team today, we'd love to help!