Website performance

To close this lesson, we should now understand a little more about performance. Now that we know what is involved with everything related to websites and servers, how can we improve our website’s performance? There are a few approaches to this.

As you may have guessed, most of our issues related to server performance goes back to the amount of data being requested.

So, most of our concerns related to it are deeply linked to it.

A good practice is to minimize requests, such as compiling programming files in fewer files.

For example, you can compile your stylesheets (files that change your website appearance) in one. Every plugin tends to have one or more stylesheets, and your theme can have one or more too.

So, there’s a way to compile, if not all files, many into one single file.

Instead of making several requests to your server to retrieve all of these files, fewer requests will be made.

The same goes for other programming files and assets.

During the front-end development, you can also control some behaviors to optimize your website loading.

As we have seen, your hosting server is constrained by how much data it can handle simultaneously (RAM). So one of the most effective ways to improve your website’s performance is to store static versions of your dynamic pages.

There are pages that, although they display dynamic content, their content stays mostly the same.

So, instead of loading it every single time from zero, you can store a static version of it on your server and present it to your users. This static version is called cache. 

Additionally, to improve delivery, you can reduce the size of your files, by compressing them.

This will result in less workload on your servers. Obviously, it demands a good balance because compression leads to lower quality – so a heavily compressed image will look pixelated to the user.