How to Diagnose and Fix Common Website Performance Issues

It all comes down to website performance. As a site owner or administrator, you could know and apply all the world’s SEO, keyword optimization, and content marketing techniques.

Yet, it could all still fall apart because your website loaded one second slower than it should have. That’s how important a website’s performance can be to any SEO strategy.

Contrary to popular belief, website performance is not limited to loading speed. Performance covers the whole range of a website’s usability, stability, interactivity, and reliability.

However, when a website is hit with a performance issue, one of the most immediately noticeable symptoms is that the loading speed drops.

Hence, several people, including experts, associate loading speed with website performance even though it is broader than that.

Why the Performance of Your Website Matters

We have mentioned that performance issues predominantly affect the speed at which a website loads, but that is not all. In reality, the slow loading speed cascades into a whole set of multiple compounding issues.

At first, with a slow loading speed comes a high bounce rate, as visitors increasingly leave your website if they cannot get what they want within the time they need.

Website performance issues may also cause low engagement, even if the loading speed is fine.

For example, if your website is not properly optimized for mobile viewing, even if it loads fast, it will witness fewer meaningful user interactions.

These negative impacts, high bounce rate, and low engagement are some considerations by which search engine algorithms judge the quality of websites to display as results to search queries.

Google penalizes websites with too many performance issues because these could be signs of spam or malware.

Whether your website is officially penalized or not, all of these lead to lower search engine rankings until your website fades into irrelevance if those issues go unresolved. That’s not to mention that performance issues affect how visitors view your site.

Suppose your website is plagued by too many problems affecting user experience. In that case, it will force visitors to make negative conclusions about your brand’s credibility, which every entrepreneur seeks to protect at all costs.

Ultimately, your business loses key sources of revenue, all because your website did not perform as expected.

As you can see, the importance of ensuring visitor retention and user satisfaction cannot be overemphasized, especially when the performance of your website is responsible for so much. Let’s now consider some common website performance issues and how you can diagnose and fix them.

1. Broken Pages and Redirects

Having too many broken links and redirects on your website could make you incur penalties from search engines such as Google. It inevitably affects your website rankings for keywords you want to rank for and, as such, is a problem to be fixed immediately after it is noticed.

How do you determine if your website has broken links? Continuously observe your website using the Eye10 Backlink Monitor. Although this tool is for backlinks, you can also use it to monitor internal links.

Once you have identified the broken links, optimize the error pages by adding FAQs, links to similar content, or a website search bar. Don’t leave a broken link showing the “Error 404” message. Alternatively, use a 301 redirect to automatically divert users to a relevant, working page, bypassing the error notification.

2. Slow Loading time

Slow loading times are the leading cause of a high website bounce rate. In most cases and under normal network conditions, internet users can spare no longer than two seconds waiting for a website to load completely. That means anything above three seconds indicates that there is a problem.

To determine if your website loads properly, test the speed using the Eye10 Pagespeed tool. It integrates results from two popular website speed platforms (Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix) into a single system.

Each of these results specifies your site loading speed from different perspectives and recommends solutions you may take to improve the speed. These could include compressing images, using fewer media files, implementing caching plugins, etc.

3. Device Incompatibility

Some statistics indicate that there are as many as 6.9 billion smartphone users worldwide, representing 86% of the world’s population. With this significant number of users accessing the internet and opening web pages via a smartphone, there is no excuse for any website not being optimized for mobile performance today.

One of the key elements of mobile-friendliness is implementing a responsive web design that adapts to the screen size of the user’s device to access the web.

Google and Bing each have free mobile-friendliness tests with recommendations for fixing issues with mobile compatibility. You can begin by reviewing UX elements such as the website format, layout, visual aesthetics, media, etc.

4. Website Security

A malware attack or any other security incident opens up your website to a wide variety of issues that may even lead to you losing control of the website. That’s why you should take website security with the utmost delicateness.

It is often surprising that many website owners and administrators neglect even the simplest practices meant to guarantee website security.

The foremost of these is having an SSL certificate (HTTPS). Usually, you would have to renew it annually. So make sure that you are not missing this. In addition, always use a secure hosting provider and web server to get regular security updates.

The Eye10 On-Page SEO tool is useful for checking your web server. Also, do not forget to perform regular vulnerability audits to fix potential issues before they become too big to solve.

Another way to avoid compromising your website security is to avoid black-hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing, link buying, and spamming.

Conclusion

Website performance is not something you can afford to ignore. It affects your SEO rankings, brand reputation, and revenue bottom line. By following the best practices mentioned in this article, you can diagnose and fix common performance issues and make your website faster, smoother, and more reliable.

To take your website performance to the next level, check out Eye10 SEO tools. For a price more affordable than many similar products in the market, Eye10 offers a comprehensive suite of tools to help you optimize your website for search engines and users. Hop unto the Eye10 train by signing up today.