WordPress Hosting: How to Load Test Your Website & Optimize Its Performance
Looking for a free web host for your personal blog or business website? You’re in the right place. In this article, we’re going to give you the information you need to load test and optimize your website’s performance.
Why Do You Need To Load Test Your Website?
If you’ve ever tried to use an affiliate marketing tool like Clickbank to promote your product, you’ll know how cumbersome and time-consuming it is to track down your buyers and get the order completed.
With a load test, you can simulate the behavior of real users and track the performance of your site under stress. This way, you’ll know whether or not your site is truly ready to receive a significant amount of traffic.
Let’s say you’ve set up a website to promote a children’s clothing line. You’ve spent a lot of time and effort designing the layout of your site and building out its content. You’ve also used an affiliate tool to promote your site and earned a few bucks from your efforts. Now, you want to expand your site’s audience and grow your revenue streams. You’ve designed a landing page with an offer to give away a free hoodie if the person enters their email address.
When a user clicks that link and lands on your site, you want them to have a positive experience and become a lead or a customer. To do this, you need to stress test and analyze the performance of your site. Using tools such as Google Analytics and a free tool like HtmlChecker, you can identify key performance metrics and track their changes over time.
Why do you need to load test your website? Let’s take a look:
Usability
A major factor that affects the performance of your site is its usability. When users have a negative experience, they’ll soon leave your site and never come back. This could potentially damage your efforts to build a relationship with your audience. To avoid this, you need to ensure that your site is equipped with all the necessary functionality necessary to satisfy your audiences’ needs. This includes ensuring that all the text in your site is easily readable, the forms on your site are easily accessible, and that all the links on your site work as expected.
Security
Security is always a major factor when it comes to determining the performance of a website. After all, you don’t want your site to be vulnerable to hackers. To prevent this, you need to make sure that all the accounts on your site are secure and that all the passwords are strong and memorable. You also need to ensure that all your site’s code is free of vulnerabilities. If you use a free tool like HtmlChecker to test the security of your site’s markup, you’ll see red flags wherever you look. This is why it’s a good idea to hire a freelance quality assurance expert to help you keep your site safe from hackers and malware.
Speed
Just because your site is functional and secure, it doesn’t mean that you should underestimate the importance of speed. When users arrive at your site and see a message that says “Sorry, this page doesn’t exist,” they’ll leave your site in search of another. This could potentially damage your relationship with current and potential customers because they’ll never come back. To avoid this, make sure that your site is equipped with all the necessary functionalities and is hosted on a fast, reliable web hosting service.
Features
Your site’s features also play an important role in its performance. Does your site have a contact form or an about Me page? A massive red flag will appear in your Google Analytics whenever these pages aren’t equipped with the functionalities necessary to satisfy your audiences’ needs. To avoid this, make sure that all the pages on your site have the necessary functionalities or that you’ve designed and implemented them yourself.
Do you have a live chat feature on your site? An engaging live chat feature can help establish trust and rapport with potential customers. When a user interacts with another person via live chat, it shows that both parties are interested in establishing a meaningful relationship. Having a live chat feature on your site can also increase traffic and sales.
A lot of websites focus too much on the design of the site and not enough on the functionality. If you want to ensure that your website will perform well, you need to make sure that all the text is easily readable, the forms are easy to find, and all the links work as expected.
Content
Your content is one of the most important aspects of any website. The quality and quantity of your content influence how well your site will perform. To ensure that you’re creating high-quality content that’ll keep your audience coming back for more, take your time to plan out solid content strategies. Create content that provides value and don’t just throw together a quick blog post to see how it goes. When you create content that’s worth reading, sharing, or doing, you’ll naturally attract an audience who values your content and will come back for more.
Redirects
If you’ve ever tried to search for something on Google and then visited a different webpage because that’s what came up when you searched, you’ll know how frustrating redirects can be. Redirects occur whenever a user follows a link on your site and lands on a different page than the one they intended to visit.
Say you’ve built a site that collects email addresses. Someone clicks a link and lands on a different page than the one they were initially on. In this case, the email address would be collected and the user would have to enter it again to continue where they left off. To avoid this, make sure that all the redirects on your site are intentional and bring the user back to the page they were initially trying to access.
Analytics
If you use Google Analytics to track the performance of your site, you’ll see a lot of red flags if it doesn’t load correctly or if certain functionality is missing. One of the most vital things you can do for the performance of your site is to correctly configure Google Analytics. Make sure that you’ve defined your goals and that you’re tracking the correct metrics. Don’t just put in general location and city stats either. Make sure that you’re getting specific with your measurements.