Performance optimization involves making technical adjustments to your website to ensure that your website loads quickly and transitions smoothly from page to page. People don’t like to wait for websites to load. A slow website will annoy your patients, and they may leave to go to your competitor’s website. In addition, performance is an important search ranking factor, so it needs to be fast for better SEO.
Performance optimization can get technical. Yet, don’t let the term scare you. If you make smart decisions at the outset, then much of the technical work is taken care of by your website hosting and platform. 20 percent effort, 80 percent results.
Selecting a search-engine-friendly website platform like WordPress will ensure that you have a technically sound base for your SEO efforts. With the right kind of platform in place, you will then want to ensure you host the site in an optimized environment. We once compared the performance of a basic WordPress site on a standard web hosting to an optimized environment. The optimized environment did much of the technical optimization required to speed up WordPress. The physical file size was reduced by two thirds and loading time was reduced to one second from three. All of this was done by making smart decisions rather than doing lots of work and performing manual optimization.
The primary takeaway is to make informed choices regarding your website platform and hosting environment. Get this right, and the complexity melts away. Don’t let web design companies scare you into paying them high monthly fees for “maintaining” your website platform. If everything is set up properly, you will just need to pay the hosting vendor a fraction of the fee for routine platform maintenance.
We recommend that you choose a WordPress platform for your site and buy a WordPress Managed Hosting plan from a reputable hosting provider. If you work with us, we will build your website on WordPress, help you choose the best and most cost-effective hosting provider, and set up the site and the hosting properly.