Web performance optimization – tips for digital publishers

Page load testing

It may seem to be trivial, but the time of your webpage loading is crucial. It directly influences users’ behavior – when it takes too much time – it will not encourage them to stay on your website. They will simply jump over to your competitors in hope they have developed their page load speed better than you did. It is a silly way to lose potential readers. It is not what we want, isn’t it? But what can you do to enhance your website’s load duration? Well, there are some things you can change yourself. The list includes image compressing, unnecessary file deleting and getting rid of plugins and codes that no longer serve you. Summing up, it will eliminate the burden your website has that prevents it from working faster. All these actions will bring you closer to a satisfactory page load speed, resulting in more happy users. And the faster your website works, the better! However, you don’t have to do everything on your own – you can use some tools (available online) to test page load speed. Just put there your website URL and wait till the results show up. All you have to do is to process the data it shows!

Web performance testing

Performance testing has a lot to do with page load testing, but it is not the same thing. Page load is actually the subtype of performance test that also includes: a stress test, capacity test, and endurance test. All these aspects examine the website’s response to the throughput and scalability. It means that the performance test determines the resilience of the website in terms of workload, extreme load conditions, and the duration that the platform is able to withstand those. Simply speaking – performance testing checks the website’s response to certain types of pressures generated by the extreme circumstances (that can possibly occur someday). Better safe than sorry! The main benefit of optimization in this area is improved prevention of errors due to unexpected events and better User Experience. If you are interested in testing this aspect of your website to a greater extent, consider using professional dedicated tools to do so.

Responsive testing

Nowadays, this aspect has gained great popularity as it determines whether the website is mobile-friendly or not. To cut a long story short, responsiveness optimization helps websites be opened on various devices. To check if your website is compatible with responsive requirements, you can test its readability on various devices’ resolution. It comes down to checking if the fonts, graphics, navigation, links, and templates on your website respond to the changes in devices’ sizes. If you want to learn more about this essential subject, you can read our article on the website responsiveness for publishers.

SEO Testing

Search Engine Optimization plays a key role in attracting users, as it determines the website’s position on the result page. Thus, it not only says something about the popularity of your website, but also about the quality of your content. However, that’s not everything! The essential part here is to optimize content well, so that the search engines’ bots can index it. To see if your website responds to mentioned aspects, you will need SEO testing. For starters, you can check which pages of your website gain the least traffic – that’s a clear sign that those need some enhancement in SEO. In the “SEO for publishers” category on our blog, you can find much more information connected to SEO optimization. Feel free to check it up!

Secondly, you can test your platform in terms of meta tags. They should be unique for each site and be compatible with the main keywords of your content. What’s more, the website shouldn’t have duplicate sites. It confuses indexing bots – they don’t know what to consider in SEO terms. It can negatively impact Search Engine Optimization and push your website down to the last search engine results pages.

What also affects SEO are links and navigation. They must work smoothly and direct users to the dedicated places of your website. The indexing procedure should go without breakages and errors, so the whole process enables the search engine bots to position your website. In order to ease the entire thing, you can use Google Search Console, which helps determine whether everything SEO-related on your web pages works properly.

To finish

As you can see, website performance optimization is a multi-level process, which demands a lot of knowledge and engagement. Well, nobody said it was easy! However, if you want to have a competitive advantage and skyrocket search engine results by affecting User Experience, you seriously have to take into consideration mentioned aspects. You will not regret that, as it will really pay off in the future! Your website’s increased traffic will be the proof of your effort. Don’t wait to make a change – start now!