The most effective strategy to continue drawing in more visitors and conversions is to iterate new (and improved) versions of your website as customer expectations and the competitive environment change. You’ve already worked hard to create a website, so consider it an opportunity to take it to the next level. To keep ahead of the competition and the expectations of your audience, it’s time to make the most of what already exists.

This article offers you the best website optimization tools available, along with one advanced suggestion you might not have considered, regardless of whether you’re just starting out or want to step up your game.

Any company with an online presence must use continual optimization to achieve iterative growth. If you’re just beginning your website optimization journey, think about using these seven free tools to get started and expanding your stack as you go:

1. PageSpeed Insights

• What it is: created by Google, PageSpeed Insights is a simple, free website speed checker
• What you can optimize: website page speed, desktop website performance, and mobile page speed
• How to use it: enter any URL and click ‘Analyze’. PageSpeed Insights will return a page speed score out of 100 and give suggestions on how to make your site load faster.

2. Hotjar

• What it is: Hotjar is a behavior analytics and product experience insights suite that measures website visitor interactions and feedback
• What you can optimize: just about everything! Find and fix bugs, optimize page design for conversion rate, and improve UX with tools like Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, Feedback, and Interviews.
• How to use it: sign up and add the Hotjar tracking code to your site to automatically start recording sessions and generating heatmaps. Don’t forget to set up an on-site survey and always-on feedback widget to gather direct user feedback.

3. Google Search Console (GSC)

• What it is: Search Console is a free search optimization tool from Google
• What you can optimize: measure SEO performance, view keyword impressions, and clicks, see your backlinks, and check for crawling and speed errors
• How to use it: sign in with your Google account, verify site ownership, and wait for data to be collected

4. Screaming Frog

• What it is: Screaming Frog is website crawling software for PC, Mac, or Linux
• What you can optimize: on-page and technical SEO—find broken links, check HTML and XML sitemaps, find duplicate content, check redirects, and analyze page titles and meta descriptions
• How to use it: download Screaming Frog and enter a URL or sitemap to start crawling

5. Optimizely

• What it is: Optimizely is a powerful web experimentation platform providing A/B testing and multivariate testing tools and website personalization
• What you can optimize: use A/B testing, split testing, and multivariate testing (MVT) to test variations of different web pages and measure how they perform
• How to use it: sign up for an account and add a snippet of JavaScript code to your site to start running experiments

6. GTmetrix

• What it is: GTmetrix is a web page speed tool
• What you can optimize: page load speed
• How to use it: enter any URL and click ‘Test your site’ for a basic speed test. Click the drop-down on each recommendation to learn how to make your page load faster.

7. WAVE

• What it is: WAVE is a web accessibility evaluation tool
• What you can optimize: find accessibility issues like missing alt text, small text size, and contrast errors that make your content inaccessible to screen readers
• How to use it: enter any URL and click through the icon-coded errors to see what to change and learn why improved accessibility is important

How to Improve Website Performance

You can begin optimizing your website after testing its speed. We compiled a list of the most efficient techniques to speed up your website, while there are many more.

1. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network is a set of web servers distributed across various geographical locations that provide web content to end users with regard to their location. When you host the website on a single server, all requests from visitors are sent to the same hardware. For this reason, the time needed to process each request increases. On top of that, the load time grows when users are physically far from the server.

With CDN, user requests are redirected to the nearest server. As a result, the content is delivered to a customer  quicker and a website works faster. This is a rather expensive, but quite effective way to optimize the load time.

2. Move your website to a better host

There are three possible types of hosting:

• shared hosting,
• virtual private server (VPS) hosting, and
• dedicated server.

The most popular type of hosting is shared hosting. That’s the cheapest way to get your site online in a short time and for a low fee. It’s essential to choose a fast web host to ensure better optimization. With shared hosting, you have a portion of CPU, disk space, and RAM with other sites that also use this server. This is the main reason why shared hosting isn’t as fast as VPS or a dedicated server.

VPS hosting is an isolated virtual environment within a bigger server. You can configure it as you wish, taking advantage of dedicated resources (CPU, RAM, storage space, and operating system).

 If your website has the average traffic or you have the eCommerce site with traffic spikes in some periods, VPS will be the optimal optionfor you.

The most expensive hosting option is a dedicated server which can be your own physical server. In this case, you pay a server rent and hire a system administrator to maintain it.

Read Also: Top 5 Web Resources for Website Security

Another approach is to rent dedicated cloud resource from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, or other public cloud provider. Both approaches can also be combined into a hybrid cloud. With dedicated servers, all resources belong only to you and you get the full control of it. Cloud infrastructures can also add unlimited and on-demand scalability under a number of packages.

Serverless architecture is yet another option that removes maintenance and server set up procedures altogether.

3. Optimize the size of images on your website

Everyone loves eye-catching images. I A lot of photos and graphics on your product pages improve engagement. The negative side  is that visuals are usually large files, slowing down a website.

The best way to reduce the image size without compromising its quality is to compress  files with such tools as ImageOptim, JPEGmini, or Kraken. The procedure may take a bit of time, but it’s worth it. You can also use the HTML responsive images <secret> and <size> attributes that adjust image size based on user display properties.

4. Reduce the number of plugins

Plugins are common components of each website. They add specific features suggested by third parties. Unfortunately, the more plugins are installed, the more resources are needed to run them. As a result, the website works slower and also security issues can appear. As time passes, the number of plugins grows, while some of them may not be used anymore.

We recommend checking out all the plugins you have installed and deleting unnecessary ones. First, run the performance tests on your page to find out which plugins are slowing down your website. Not only does the website speed depend on the number of installed plugins, but also on their quality. Try to avoid plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles or generate a lot of database queries. The best solution is to preserve only the necessary ones and ensure they are kept up to date.

5. Minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files

If your website contains a lot of JavaScript and CSS files, it leads to a large number of HTTP requests when your visitors want to access particular files. These requests are treated individually by a visitor’s browser and slow down the website work. If you reduce the number of JavaScript and CSS files this will undoubtedly speed up your website.

Try to group all JavaScript into one and also do so with all CSS files. This will reduce the overall number of HTTP requests. There are a lot of tools to minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files quickly. For instance, you can use  WillPeavy, Script Minifier, or Grunt tools.

6. Use website caching

In case there are a lot of users accessing the page simultaneously,  servers work slowly and need more time to deliver the web page to each user. Caching is the process of storing the current version of your website on the hosting and presenting this version until your website is updated. This means that the web page doesn’t render over and over again for each user.

Approaches to website caching depend on the platform your website is developed on. For WordPress, for instance, you can apply the following plugins: W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache. If you use VPS or a dedicated server, you can also use caching under your general settings. In the case of the shared server, website caching isn’t usually available.

7. Implement GZIP compression

GZIP is a modern standard of file compression employed by more than half  of websites. It can reduce the amount of data transferred over the Internet by 70 percent and thus dramatically improves a site speed. 

 GZIP compression minimizes the content of HTTP requests and responses before sending them to the browser. On the user side, a browser unzips the files and presents the contents. This method can work with all files on your website.

There are also other data compression methods— such as Brotli (used by 39 percent of websites) and Deflate (used by only 0.6 percent of websites).

Learn what option your server supports. If it hasn’t enabled any, read the documentation of your hosting provider to get instructions on your next steps. Note that your host may not permit you to implement compression. But in most cases, it takes adding a few lines of code or installing a utility(gzip or Brotli) to reduce files and thus speed up your website.

8. Optimize a database in CMS

Database optimization is an effective way to increase performance. If you use a content management system (CMS) packed with complex plugins, the database size increases and your website works slower. For instance, the WordPress CMS stores comments, blog posts, and other information that takes up a lot of data storage. Each CMS requires its own optimization measures and also has a number of specific plugins. For WordPress, for example, you may consider WP-Optimize.

9. Reduce the use of web fonts

Web fonts have become very popular in website design. Unfortunately, they add extra HTTP requests to external resources, which has a negative impact on the speed of page rendering.  To reduce the size of web font traffic use modern formats WOFF2; and nclude only needed character sets and d styles.

10. Detect 404 errors

A 404 error means that a “Page isn’t found”. This message is provided by the hosting to browsers or search engines when the accessed content of a page no longer exists. To spot and correct a 404 error, use error detection tools and plugins. As we mentioned, additional plugins can negatively affect your website speed, so we advise running the resource through external tools  — for instance, Xenu’s Link Sleuth or 404 Redirected Plugin For WordPress.  

Once you’ve detected all 404 errors, you need to assess the traffic that they generate. If these dead links no longer bring any visits and thus never consume your server resources, you may leave them as they are. If these pages still have some traffic coming, consider setting redirects for external links and fixing the link addresses for the internal ones.

Final Thoughts

We recommend applying a simple yet effective website speed optimization approach which includes the following steps.

Check and evaluate the key factors of website success, considering conversion, visibility, and usability.

Test your current website speed against key metrics  — time to first bite, first contentful paint, largest contentful paint, and page load time. Note that not only your homepage needs checking. Test your product pages, blog posts, and other parts of the website. It’s also essential to evaluate how your site performs on mobile devices.

Prioritize fixes depending on what needs the most attention. For instance, if it takes too long (beyond 1.8 seconds) to receive a response from the server (poor time to first bite), you should consider moving to a faster host (say, a dedicated server), implementing CDN, and setting up a caching layer.

Start your optimization with the most speed-reducing aspects and focus on the pages that define your conversion success the most.

Implement regular audits and reporting. Website speed testing should become a part of your routine. Conduct it on a regular basis, especially after updates, bug fixes, or adding new content to your site. Regular checks will protect your online business from performance setbacks.