You want to speed up your website to improve your user experience, SEO and conversion rates, and you’re looking for the best solution to optimize your loading times? Do you think you can do it all in-house, or on the contrary, would you like to entrust this mission to a service provider, but are afraid of losing control of your infrastructure?
Here’s an overview of the options available, from 100% in-house to outsourcing, and the advantages and limitations of each.
Optimizing page speed: in-house solutions
You can entrust the optimization of your website’s front end to your in-house technical teams, with the time, resources and expertise to work on your code. Here are a few tips to guide you (you’ll also find them in our monthly newsletter, simply subscribe here).
Define a performance budget
Before embarking on a webperf project, you need to set a Performance Budget to define the objectives to be achieved and the thresholds not to be exceeded.
How do you get your bearings? KPIs can vary according to your starting point and market.
For example, you can refer to JDN’s monthly webperf ranking. This ranking gives an idea, by sector (e-commerce, media and travel), of the performance on mobile of the most visited websites in France: Speed Index, Time To Interactive, page weight…
For example, Rue Du Commerce reached the top of the ranking by applying best practices and techniques for optimizing loading times over time, drawing on our expertise.
You can also set gross performance thresholds, as Rossignol did when it wanted to divide its Speed Index by 10, or iDGARAGES, which planned to lower it by 45%. There are manymetrics, each relating to different aspects of speed (display, interactivity, server response time…) – above all, you need to identify your own improvement levers and challenges.
Are you working on your SXO (SEO + UX)? Google, which is placing increasing emphasis on speed for SEO purposes, indicates thresholds that must not be exceeded for its Core Web Vitals. These are 3 key webperf metrics for evaluating a website’s user experience according to Google, and which factor into its search results ranking algorithm:
- a First Input Delayscore below 100 ms ,
- Cumulative Layout Shift less than 0.1,
- a Largest Contentful Paint which occurs within the first 2.5 seconds after the page has started loading.
But how do you go about achieving your page acceleration targets?
Resources for optimizing website performance
Speed isn’t just the responsibility of technical teams!
Marketing, E-commerce, Product… All teams must be involved to ensure a fast website, on mobile as well as desktop.
Working hand in hand ensures that performance is maintained over the long term, as is the case at Le Parisien, where the product and IT teams systematically coordinate before new features go online. In this way, performance and security risks are anticipated, and the impact on each page is also monitored a posteriori.
Essential optimizations for a fast website
There are many ways to improve site speed.
You need to take care of your backend by choosing a hosting solution adapted to your needs, and rely on a CDN.
These measures must be accompanied by front-end optimizations for optimum results. This is the approach taken by Conforama, whose technical teams realized that the Backend alone was not delivering the performance improvements they had hoped for, so they also worked on the Frontend to further improve loading speed.
Among the essential web performance techniques – which you may already know and apply :
- optimization of fonts and image files (compression, lazyloading…),
- concatenation and minification of resources (HTML / JS / CSS files),
- cachingstrategy ,
- Third Partymanagement ,
- HTTPSoptimization …
If your teams are structured and trained for it, all these optimizations can be applied in-house.
Bear in mind, however, that this is a long-term project, and that you may need occasional or regular expertsupport to guide you towards the best practices and most up-to-date techniques. These evolve rapidly, requiring constant monitoring, research and adjustment.
If you don’t have the resources in-house, most CMS – if you use one – offer plugins dedicated to speed. Here are a few examples.
Plugins and extensions to improve speed
Magento extensions
- Apptrian Minify. This Magento extension removes all unnecessary characters from HTML files, handles CSS and JS inlining, and offers a Cache Compatibility mode . Installation is free, but support is not.
- Apptrian Image Optimizer. This Magento plugin optimizes .GIF, .JPEG and .PNG files with the Guetzli compression format (note that this is a lossy compression format).
- Defer Parsing of JavaScript. This Magento plugin is activated from the backend and enables HTML and CSS scripts to be executed before JavaScript.
WordPress / WooCommerce plugins
- WPRocket. This WordPress plugin is the most popular for speeding up a WordPress site. It integrates a caching system, font management and Third Parties.
- Imagify. This image optimization plugin for WordPress allows you to reduce the weight of images, crop them on the fly, define a compression level, and restore media to its original version.
- Perfmatters. This WordPress plugin optimizes page speed on WordPress sites, notably by getting rid of certain files (emojis, JS, jQuery), prioritizing script loading, and activating DNS Prefetch or Preconnect…
Prestashop addons
- Page Cache Ultimate. This Prestashop addon caches pages in the browser for faster loading.
- Image WebP Compression. This Prestashop add-on compresses images in WebP format and also supports lazyloading to load only the elements to be displayed in the viewport.
- Super Speed module. This Prestashop module offers a package of several optimizations: cache, image optimization, Prestashop database optimization, HTML/JS/CSS minification and Gzip compression.
All these plugins help to improve certain aspects of performance. If you’re completely self-sufficient when it comes to installing and uninstalling them, you’ll have noticed that each one doesn’t cover every conceivable speed issue .
For a complete approach, it’s best to go for an all-in-one Frontend Optimizationsolution , to make sure that all your needs are met, and that the optimizations work well together and are automated.
Automatically accelerate web pages and relieve technical teams
CDN: a web performance fundamental
If you’re concerned about loading times, you may already be using a CDN. It’s the basis for bringing content closer to users, but it’s not enough on its own to speed up websites. For really fast pages, you need to optimize your front end, and that involves the performance optimization techniques we discussed earlier.
But what if your teams aren’t trained or expert in webperf? Or if they simply don’t have the time to deal with loading times? Take the pressure off!
Simply opt for aNext GenerationCDN that automates the application of webperf best practices and techniques.
This is the choice made by retailer Celio, whose entire technical stack is based on our Next GenerationCDN . The IT department remains totally autonomous in the management of its infrastructure, and benefits at the same time from a CDN service and a SaaS solution for front-end optimization , with an advanced caching system, image optimization… What’s more, the e-commerce platform remains stable even during peak workloads… All for a controlled budget. As a result, technical teams are relieved, and customers are more engaged with a site that offers a better user experience (speed, security and availability).
Web performance: support and expertise for a fast site
Another advantage of a SaaS web page acceleration solution is the support provided by experts in the field.
As we mentioned earlier, best practices and webperf techniques are constantly evolving, and you need to be able to keep up to date through careful monitoring.
At Fasterize, this is precisely the role of the Customer Success Engineers, who accompany customers from testing through to regular reviews and reports to challenge performance on an ongoing basis.
A SaaS solution can be useful even in large organizations, where resources may not have the bandwidth to devote to continuous speed improvement.
That’s why But relies on our optimization engine: so that teams don’t have to repeat the same work indefinitely each time the site’s code changes or evolves. The result: a fast, secure site, and the deployment in 3 weeks of several projects that this e-tailer had planned over 12 months.
This was also the choice made by Orange Marine: by automating the optimization of its Frontend, the IT department of this specialist in nautical equipment also optimized its budget, and its conversion rates increased by 5%, thanks to a faster site on mobile and desktop.
In conclusion:
- you can speed up your site in-house, but this requires time and resources ;
- you can rely on plugins depending on the CMS you’re using, but with the limitations we’ve outlined;
- you can rely on a SaaS solution, which takes the pressure off your teams and your budget, and gives you the benefit of expert advice. You also retain control of your infrastructure, since you can activate or deactivate each feature at any time. If you’re curious to know more, find out how our solution works here.
Take stock of your web performance,
and find out what you can do to optimize your web pages
for better loading times :