Common Mistakes that Kill Website Performance
Identify common mistakes that can harm your website’s performance and learn how to avoid them for better results
Table of Contents
Managing your company website and website performance can be a daunting and repetitive task, but it has to be done on a regular basis. As a business owner, you can take actionable steps to improve your website’s performance, ranking, and conversions. Otherwise, you risk losing customer faith and damaging your brand, completely demolishing all of your hard work.
Whether you’re building your enterprise site from scratch or attempting to keep up with its monthly, weekly, and daily requirements, there are some common mistakes that many websites fall victim to and that you should avoid at all costs.
Introduction to Website Performance
Website performance is more than just a technical concern—it’s a cornerstone of online success. In today’s digital landscape, where more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, ensuring your website is fast, responsive, and user friendly is extremely important. Mobile users expect web pages to load quickly and display seamlessly across all screen sizes, and any delay can lead to lost potential customers and missed business growth opportunities.
A high-performing website not only attracts more visitors but also keeps them engaged, encouraging repeat visits and conversions. Search engines like Google factor website speed and mobile optimization into their rankings, making performance a key part of your SEO strategy. Elements such as browser caching, which stores frequently accessed resources locally, can dramatically improve load times and create a seamless user experience. By focusing on these core aspects—website speed, mobile optimization, and browser caching—you lay the groundwork for a site that delights users and drives your business forward.
Getting Started
There are quite a few factors that can impact your website’s performance, ranging from simple issues that are easily solved to events that feel completely beyond your control. Websites fail when these foundational areas are neglected, leading to poor optimization, server limitations, and design flaws.
In our experience, there are three key areas to focus on as a strong foundation upon which you can build excellent website performance, as neglecting these areas can make the site harder to manage and use.
1. Optimized for all browsers
Simply ensuring that the site looks decent on your favorite browser is not enough. Your visitors are going to be accessing the site via a variety of browsers and devices, so it's crucial to have a mobile friendly design to provide a consistent experience and avoid losing potential users. This includes mobile browsers as well! Mobile traffic accounts for more than half of all web traffic and that number is only growing. Having a well-optimized mobile site is essential for both user experience and search rankings, especially with Google's mobile-first indexing.
2. Eliminate Dead Links to Improve User Experience
Ensure that your site is free from dead links or perceived detours that can diminish the customer experience. Every button, link, and menu should do what your visitors expect it to.
3. Easily understandable content
Having your menus and company contact info where your customers are accustomed to seeing them along with clear explanations of your services and products is vital to performance. Clearly stating the purpose of the site and the specific purpose of each web page a visitor may encounter is also of critical importance.
A Basic Blunder
Every single graphic and image on your website is important. Why? Because aside from what the image conveys to the visitor, the image can also have a huge impact on site performance. Larger images eat up bandwidth and take longer to load in the browser. If your site has a lot of large images, you’re adding extra load time for every single one of them. Failing to compress images can significantly slow down loading speed, which negatively affects SEO and user experience. These load times can compound, grinding your pages to a halt for users and increasing the time your site takes to fully load.
Furthermore, the file format of each image is extremely important because browsers can easily load images that are in JPG, PNG, and GIF format, while heavy formats like BMP or TIFF take much longer to load and should be avoided. It’s crucial to optimize images for faster load times and better site performance.
Taking photos of your products and simply uploading them to the site is not recommended at all. Unoptimized images can result in slow load times, especially on mobile devices, which can hurt your search rankings and increase bounce rates.
There are multiple tools available that will help you optimize your images, and if you’re managing the site yourself, as well as plugins and tools that can help with the image editing process, these tools can also compress images and improve site performance.
Using high-resolution images only makes sense when absolutely necessary for design or branding purposes.
Spaghetti Code Can Be a Mess
Another key factor that can negatively impact site performance is having code in places it doesn’t belong. Over time, even the most well-maintained websites are likely to include legacy code that shouldn’t be there. CSS that is unneeded, JavaScript that doesn’t serve a purpose, or simply too many scripts can all slow down your site and negatively impact performance.
Additionally, too many plugins can contribute to code bloat and further degrade your website’s speed and reliability. It’s important to understand and remember that just because you don’t see this code, it is still running in the background and gobbling up precious resources.
Regular code audits can help reduce or remove this code. Just as an overgrown lawn will impact the curb appeal of a house, "overgrown" code will start to make your website unwieldy, and a cluttered site feels outdated or untrustworthy to visitors as well.
Technical SEO Issues
Technical SEO issues are a common mistake that can quietly undermine your website’s performance and visibility in search engines. Problems like poorly structured URLs, duplicate content, and missing alt attributes on images can confuse both users and search engine crawlers, leading to lower rankings and higher bounce rates. These issues make it harder for your target audience to find your site and for search engines to understand your website’s content.
To avoid these pitfalls, it’s essential to conduct regular technical SEO audits using tools such as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console. These tools help you identify and fix common mistakes before they impact your site’s performance. Additionally, optimizing images, compressing JavaScript files, and leveraging content delivery networks (CDNs) can significantly reduce load times and improve the overall user experience. By addressing technical SEO issues proactively, you strengthen your website’s foundation, boost your rankings, and ensure your site performs at its best.
Core Web Vitals and Performance
Core Web Vitals are a set of essential metrics that measure how users experience the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of your website. These metrics—such as loading time, interactivity, and layout shifts—are now a crucial part of Google’s ranking algorithm. Poor Core Web Vitals scores can make your site feel sluggish, frustrate visitors, and push your web pages lower in search results.
Improving your Core Web Vitals starts with optimizing images, enhancing site speed, and ensuring your site is user friendly across all devices. Tools like Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights can help you monitor your Core Web Vitals and pinpoint areas for improvement. By prioritizing these metrics, you not only improve your website’s performance but also create a better experience for your users, leading to increased traffic and higher conversion rates.
Browser Caching and Load Times
Browser caching is a powerful technique for boosting website performance and reducing load times. By storing frequently used resources—such as images and JavaScript files—directly in a user’s browser, you minimize the need for repeated requests to your web server. This means that when a visitor returns to your site, pages load much faster, creating a smoother and more engaging experience.
To take advantage of browser caching, you can use plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache, and configure your web server to set appropriate cache expiration times. Additionally, optimizing images, compressing files, and reducing the number of HTTP requests can further decrease load times. These improvements not only enhance user satisfaction but also contribute to better search engine rankings and increased conversions, making browser caching an essential part of any website speed optimization strategy.
One Big Performance Decision for Every Website
When it comes to your website’s performance, there are multiple factors that can have a negative impact. However, the biggest common mistake that can kill your site performance is choosing the wrong host.
"Discount" hosting and high-pressure salespeople may make certain hosts seem attractive at the onset, but the repercussions of an inferior host will be felt far and wide. If your server’s performance is poor, it will take longer to respond to even the most basic request and no matter how optimized everything else on the site is, a slow server will always give your visitors a slow start and immediately devalue their experience.
While there are a few exceptions, unacceptable server speed is generally on the shoulders of your web host. Those discount hosting services will usually place your site on a shared server, meaning that you share resources with an unknown number of other sites. This can result in your site being slow to respond simply because your website doesn’t have enough memory or bandwidth to perform at an optimal level. Shared hosting can compromise your website's performance due to resource limitations, making it difficult to maintain fast load times and reliability.
Another huge drawback to those cheap hosting providers is where they put your website. Many times, they are simply reselling space for server farms in other countries and your website ends up being physically located in a land far, far away.
If the bulk of your customers are in the US and your server is based in India, when they access your site the information has to travel all the way across the ocean, request access to the server, then travel all the way back across the ocean to load on their screen. Sure, data travels extraordinarily fast these days, but when you consider the other factors such as shared servers and unoptimized content, your server’s location is rather important. Frequent downtime from unreliable hosting can also harm your site's reputation and erode user trust.
Of course, excessive traffic during peak seasons or sales can result in diminished site performance, especially if you don’t have a partner that helps you automatically scale for those occasions. However, when choosing a host you need to keep in mind those normal, everyday shoppers. Poor hosting can lead to lost potential revenue during these high-traffic periods if your site cannot handle the demand.
Every single element of your website requires a different "file request" to load. Every piece of Javascript, all images, every social sharing button, and the CSS file is a new file request. An underperforming server can only handle a certain amount of requests per second, and this includes the file requests of any other sites sharing your server. Hosting quality is critical for your website's performance, affecting everything from speed to user experience.
Effective Landing Pages
Landing pages are the gateway to turning web traffic into potential clients and customers. An effective landing page combines a clear call to action, relevant keywords, and a seamless user experience tailored to your target audience. Understanding user behavior through tools like Google Analytics allows you to refine your landing pages, ensuring they address your visitors’ needs and guide them smoothly toward conversion.
Incorporating social proof—such as customer testimonials and reviews—can build trust and encourage action. Regularly reviewing and optimizing your landing pages keeps them aligned with your SEO strategy and responsive to changes in user flow and preferences. By focusing on these elements, you can create landing pages that not only attract more visitors but also convert them into loyal customers, driving business growth and maximizing your website’s performance.
Keep Your Website From Dragging Its Feet
The fact is, there are quite a few simple mistakes you can make that will have an adverse effect on your site performance. While you can definitely "learn as you go" for so many projects these days, when it comes to your company’s website there are multiple aspects that need an expert touch from the word go. For more details on Optimization, refer to this official guide.
Using website analytics is essential to track your website's performance and identify areas for improvement, helping you make informed decisions to enhance lead generation and user experience.
Simple things such as excessive plugins and unnecessary redirects can not only affect performance, it can diminish your visitor’s experience. When it comes to enterprise website development, we have the skills and expertise to cover every aspect.
From basic consulting to custom development, we help you ensure that your performance is "up to speed" and is designed explicitly to drive more visitors to convert to customers. Contact us today to find out how we can customize the perfect support or development package for either your existing website or planned enterprise site.
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