Business
Top 7 Website Page Performance Issues with AEM and Beyond
AEM-based websites, or any others for that matter, can experience numerous website page performance issues. Poor website performance causes you to lose visitors and ranking authority among search engines. It’s vital to recognize what those web performance issues are in order to troubleshoot them.
A proven way is to run your site through a web performance audit. Here at Exadel, we’ve seen many sites struggle to hit their best performance mark due to untackled page performance issues. We cover these issues in this article and so let’s get right on with it!
Mission-Critical Web Page Performance Issues To Tackle
We’ve completed a number of assessments and identified the most common website performance issues, which are the result of developers’ ignorance or lack of due diligence at the development stage.
Here’s a rundown of website page performance issues that are sure to pull your site away from search engines’ immediate reach.
Images
An image can speak a thousand words and entice website visitors to linger more on pages. However, if your images load slowly, it can repel visitors from navigating your website further and make them leave your site altogether. Your website page performance can really lag behind if images haven’t been optimized properly either before or after uploading them to your site. There can be various issues with images on the page and the most common ones are:
using a non-optimal image format
the absence of lazy loading
wrong cache lifetime settings
images that are too large for mobile devices
small images that are not combined into a sprite
SVG images that are not compressed and injected inline
Video
If you’re utilizing videos on your site, you can run into page performance issues as well. If the videos you play on your site are too large, they will pause or buffer every time a user attempts to view them. Without proper compression and a compatible format with the HTML code, you’re sure to have a hard time keeping your website page performance up to a high standard.
Server Response Time
Common website performance issues are often linked to the server response time. When a certain web page residing on a server is requested, it should load everything that it has before a website visitor sees the actual page. You can have great front-end implementation, yet a slow server response could slow down the website’s performance. Therefore, pay attention to your server. You will most likely need to have an in-depth look at the code to understand what to fix on the server side: database, deployment, and the like.
Developers’ Code Notes
When building a website, front-end developers can use spacing, comments, and other variables to make the code clearer for themselves or others who may pick up the work. While it’s an advantage at the development stage, it is a downside when a site goes live, causing website page performance issues of its own. Browsers take time to parse page content along with developers’ so-called ‘notes’, which, in turn, takes additional time and network traffic.
JavaScript and CSS
On top of the code developers create to make themselves clear, there are CSS and JavaScript files that dictate what and how you see things on a web page. They should be fully loaded before the user sees anything. If there’s a redundancy of JavaScript and CSS files or the JavaScript code isn’t minified, the load speed decreases, leading to website page performance issues.
This is a significant bottleneck for pre-built themes in CMS like WordPress or Magento. In AEM-based development and beyond, some JavaScript and CSS code remains unused, or time is halted until ads, chats, or third-party plugins have loaded first. Additionally, developers can skip prioritizing JavaScript and CSS loading sequences, which can certainly cause web performance issues since non-critical files load first.
Last but not least, huge amounts of CSS and JavaScript unstructured code take up most of the rendering capacity, worsening website page performance. Or web developers can choose to put entire website code into one big JavaScript file, instead of splitting code into chunks or loading chunks of code on demand.
HTML
HTML is basically the foundation necessary to display all website assets: images, videos, content, and the like with the help of tags. This web performance issue lies in creating long HTML code that is redundant. Unless a developer decides to optimize the code and use HTML minification and compression, there’s no way you could speed up your web performance.
Fonts
You may be using several fonts which, when done wrong, can damage website page performance and the look and feel of your web page. Sometimes, fonts can flicker or be invisible for a fraction of a second. For instance, when you open a web page, the fonts flicker to a font you have not set it to. Five seconds later the fonts flicker to the font your web page is currently set to. Additionally, your fonts may not be compressed into the woff2 format or your site may not be using font subsets.
Troubleshooting Web Performance Issues
As they say, do web performance well, and it will yield traffic, leads and sales. There is nothing as frustrating as a preloader that keeps on spinning.
To get rid of website page performance issues, you should run a site audit to see where reworking is needed or build software incorporating the best web performance practices.