Website performance

Google loves fast websites

Website performance plays a huge part in accessibility, conversions & SEO. Indigo Tree specialise in building websites that load very quickly. We can also work on older sites to speed them up. Contact us today for a free website performance health check!

If you already have a WordPress website we can review your website and then recommend changes which will:

• Speed up your website to give your users a better experience.
• Improve your Google ranking – speed has been a factor since 2010.

We will use a number of online website testing tools to check your site’s performance and provide actionable recommendations to fix these issues in a report.

You cannot purchase a Citroen C1 and expect it to be fast. You could make it faster, but you could never make it fast… This is just as true for websites. You’re as fast as the technology you use, so it’s important to include website performance upfront during the planning & design of the site to get the most out of the project.

There are trade offs of course, which is why a website performance budget can be useful and help towards decisions around those trade offs

What we do with our code…

We develop and control our code to implement the following:

• Minify CSS & JS
• Compress Images
• Remove redirect chains
• Enable HTTP compression (Gzip/Brotli)
• Leverage browser caching
• Avoid CSS @import

What we do with hosting…

If we use our website hosting solution we can also implement the following:

• Use a CDN for static resources
• Use HTTP caching (Varnish/Nginx)
• Use Memcached/Redis object caching
• Use HTTP/2 (only if the site has a security certificate)

Sometime we can also…

• Use modern font files (woff & woff2)
• Decrease the number of domains content is served from
• Use a third party email sending service
• Avoid animating expensive CSS properties
• Serve images at the correct dimensions

What we can also do…

Dependent on development budget and any constraints on the project we can also:

• Use faster technologies (NodeJS, Static, Go)
• Serve content over a CDN (can only do this if it’s static)
• Use a faster, paid-for DNS service
• Avoid bootstrap/foundation
• Prioritise/Inline important/structural CSS
• Code splitting & Tree shaking
• Cache (via Service Worker)
• Background Tasks (via Service Worker)
• HTTP/2 Server Push
• WebP instead of JPG/PNG
• Use will-change CSS property for interactive elements
• Decrease DOM elements
• Background processing & message queues
• Use PHP7 instead of PHP5
• Decrease server resonse time
• Serve images optimised for the size & pixel density of the device
• Avoid CSS expressions
• Remove render blocking resources
• Pre-rendering
• Lazy loading
• Progressive Booting
• Load JS/CSS with async/defer
• DNS prefetch, asset preloading & page pre-render

Things that hurt website performance…

• Tracking scripts
• Third party “widgets” like facebook/twitter widgets

Website Monitoring

Our website monitoring tool operates on all sites covered by one of our website maintenance agreements, so that our clients experience peace of mind, knowing that the following are being taken care of:

• Domain name expiry – make sure your domain doesn’t lapse into someone else’s control
• Redirect checking – ensure visitors are achieving their goals
• Security – monitoring of your site’s security certificate
• DNS, MX and IP Address monitoring – ensure your site is live, and your emails are working
• SEO checking – including Google Analytics and accessibility to search bots
• Broken link checking – to make sure pages haven’t been moved or erased accidentally