Your Website Needs a Tune-up

Websites are a bit like cars: they need regular maintenance. Change the oil, replace the tires. Most people tend to think that maintenance on their website consists only of visual changes: redesign, add widgets, or update the content. While those are absolutely necessary for marketing, they don’t help maintain the engine of your website.

Before you start throwing down cash on shiny new rims and a fresh paint job, consider a few performance upgrades first. With the help of a few savvy developers, you can speed up the load time of your website, increase search engine optimization, remove security threats, and make it faster and easier for future updates (like that coveted a redesign). I’ll show you three proven methods to boost your website performance without moving a pixel.

1. Upgrade Your Software

If your website is built on a particular framework like Ruby on Rails or our personal favorite, CodeIgniter for PHP; or if you have a  Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress or ExpressionEngine, chances are your software is already out of date. I consider these software packages to be the engine of your website and just like car engines, they become outdated and get replaced by better, faster versions. Obviously software updates move at an even faster rate.

Major milestone versions (e.g. 3.1 to 3.2) usually contain new features and can be released anywhere from once a year to once a month, depending on the software. With website development lasting anywhere from several weeks to several months, your CMS may be out of date before your website even launches! Good developers will keep you as up to date as they can, but there may be custom developed features that make the upgrade process somewhat less than automatic. No matter how painful (or expensive) that process is though, it is important for several reasons.

Security

The more minor updates usually contain security fixes and can be released as often as once a week. If the security issue isn’t already widely known, it certainly will be once the patch notes are released. Hackers will target outdated versions by exploiting the known security holes. Keep your software up to date to eliminate that risk.

Performance

While poorly developed software can get bogged down with feature bloat (I’m looking at you WinAmp), the software that runs your website should be listing speed as a feature. As long as that’s the case, performance will improve, especially when jumping whole versions (e.g. 3 to 4). If you don’t update, you’ll never see those speed improvements and your website will likely get slower as images, videos, and widgets build up.

Support

Typically the first suggestion you’ll get when complaining about a bug, is to update to the newest version. The longer you go without updating, the harder it will be to find relevant support of the particular version you’re using. Unless you pay for legacy support, you might not get any official support until you upgrade.

2. Refactor Your Code

Not all code is created equal. Whether it was poorly written in the first place, or suffers from problems due to multiple authors, code can quickly become a jumbled mess. This so called spaghetti code can slow down performance, cause unpredictable errors, and make every bit of maintenance a real pain the in the ass.

All is not lost. You may not need to toss everything and rebuild from scratch. Instead, you should refactor your code. Refactoring is a term commonly used by programmers, which means to modify or rewrite a bit of code to improve it somehow, without changing what it actually does. This can mean making it easier to read, easier to maintain, or better performing.

If your pages take too long to even start loading (between clicks), you may want to refactor some of your server-side code. If parts of your website load slowly or it feels sluggish in all but the newest browsers, you may want to refactor your front-end code. Advancements in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript have made previously file-size heavy features, light and quick to respond.

Even if you’re limited by a particular technology, like the CMS, experienced developers can always find wiggle room. At SiteGoals, our team of professional developers can diagnose, recommend, and enact solutions to improve performance across a variety of platforms and software.

3. Organize Your Files

Once you’ve finished updating your software and refactoring your code, you’ll likely have a bunch of extraneous files floating around on your FTP server. While those won’t affect performance for the visitors of your website, they will slow down anyone forced to wade through them.

Just because you’re not linking to a file, doesn’t mean it can’t still be accessed. Changing the name of a file (e.g. “index” to “index_old”) doesn’t remove it from the web. The robots that Google, etc. use to collect search engine results, will find everything on your website unless you explicitly tell them to ignore it. If there’s duplicate content in those old files, your search engine ranking could take a hit. Even worse, a real person could find old and incorrect information.

In addition, those outdated files can pose security risks. Hackers will use scripts similar to Google’s robots that crawl the web looking for files that can be easily exploited. They don’t discriminate and will find your old files, if you leave them on the server.

Figure out what you aren’t using any more, back it up, and then delete it from your live server. You’ll have a nice clean file structure to navigate through, making your developers happy and productive. Another open window gets closed on those annoying hackers.

Rebuild, Revitalize, Renew

Whether you’re hiring a web developer to revamp your website or doing the work yourself, I hope I’ve given you a good idea of what to cover.