Many website owners are so inattentive with what they think users want that they ignore the essential principle of what makes the usage of the Internet so popular: its speed. While some business owners create complex User Interfaces full of graphics, slides, music effects, and more, their customers move elsewhere because websites take too long to load. Don’t you dare make these silly mistakes.

Web Performance Optimization offers numerous advantages, such as boosted conversion rates, page views, rankings on search engines, and even decrement in server bandwidth charges. These factors are especially important for mobile connections. 

Why so much attention to Web Performance Optimization?

People hate waiting, whether it’s waiting in long queues at the supermarket or poor web performance. Especially in recent times, every fraction of a second counts. The miracles of optimizing web speed and performance should not be miscalculated when it comes to aspects like conversion rates, sales, page views, rankings on the search engines, and others.

Let’s dig into some points to prove why Web Performance Optimization is so useful:

1. The first impression is the last impression

As previously stated, when a customer or visitor first visits a website, they expect it to load the website real quick within 3 seconds. Remember those first impressions are important for web-based businesses. Speed ​​plays a huge role in how audiences comprehend a brand on a web page.

Research reveals that approximately 40% of users ultimately desert a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. So, to deliver a great user experience for new visitors, a website needs to load very quickly every time the users open it.

2. SEO rankings of a website are affected by Page Speed

Google has made it very clear that they are gripped with speed for every product on the web. However, Google has also made it clear that website owners shouldn’t compromise on the quality or relevance of their content in order to make websites faster.

So, in order for websites to rank well on Google, teams need to make sure that the websites are optimized enough to load faster. Higher rankings lead to organic traffic growth, which is important for businesses.

3. Conversion rates are affected by the Page Speed

Remember that Google sentences sites with low page load speeds. More notably, customers or visitors will stop coming back to these sites or bounce back when the pages take too long to load. This leads to lost leads and revenue. This is especially true for e-commerce websites.

A website that loads quickly not only provides a good user experience but also helps create an everlasting optimistic belief in customers’ minds. Therefore, optimizing page load speed is of prime importance for every website developer and tester. It should be on their priority list from the start of development sprint cycles.

The benefits of Performance optimization are a lot more than we can even imagine and to experience those benefits, one should have complete guidance about performance optimization.

Here are some stats which make the benefit points crystal clear as to why page optimization is important:

• 70% of users desert the current website and switch to another website due to slow web page loading. 
• 1 out of 4 visitors quits a website that takes more than 4 seconds of loading time. 
• 46% of users don’t visit sites that take too much time to load. 
• Bounce rate increases to 38% for pages that load in five seconds.

When looking for ways to speed up the website, there are mainly 2 options available: page speed optimization services and performance optimization extensions. They have a massive dissimilarity in cost and consequence on the website, so today we’re going to take a look at their features and try to let the readers know when it’s best to use the service and when to install the module.

Magento 2 Performance Optimization Services

If we discuss known Magento 2-page speed optimization, which includes issues like server, caching, and manual code optimization, the online store owners cannot entrust these tasks to an offsite resolution. In this case, the store owners either have to hire an in-house expert or outsource the task to a qualified team.

The Magento Speed optimization services have their own benefits and drawbacks

Benefits

• Regardless of how the site is customized and what is causing the performance issues, eligible specialists can repair it with an optimization service. This is the main benefit of the pre-expansion service. Service users are not limited to any speed optimization settings.
• A business owner can leave the whole process up to the professionals if they are unaware of how to install the Magento Performance Optimization Extension.
• If the store owners are unaware of the reasons which are slowing down their Magento store the website performance optimization finds the factors affecting their website speed.
• When third-party extensions start hampering website speed. Magento speed optimization service checks for any extensions that are restraining the store and terminates them to optimize the Magento core.
• Whenever the  Magento store needs an optimized server and a fast host. Magento 2 performance optimization services are tweaking the store backend to reduce server response times.
• We know that heavy media files control the Magento store from loading fast. Website speed optimization uses fast loading files to improve store performance.

Drawbacks

• The Magento 2 performance optimization services are generally a bit costly in comparison to the Magento 2 page speed optimization extension.
• While the service includes a 2-month warranty on all customizations made, it is still a great thought to test the website performance optimization and submit changes whenever necessary.

When Magento 2 Performance optimization service will be more useful?

According to our experience, the optimization service is best served for larger stores, sites with a lot of customization, and sites that need server-side modifications, such as caching settings. Here are typical warnings from the Google PageSpeed ​​Insights report that can be addressed as  part of an optimization service: 

 Reduce server initial response time

• Remove unused CSS 
• Enable text compression 
• Use video formats for animated content 
• Preload key requirements 
• Pre-connect to origin required  
• Avoid too large DOM size 
• Remove render-blocking resources (CSS section) 
• Most of these alerts require a lot of manual work and custom development. 

 Of course, the final preference between an extension and a service is still up to the business owner, but optimistically, now any online store owner can make an advised conclusion knowing all the merits and demerits of each option.

Magento 2 Performance Optimization Extensions

Usually, a website consists of images, videos, scripts, fonts, CSS, and HTML, though these elements are useful for the site they also play a part in slowing down our website. Thankfully, the work of easing the burden of these elements can be self-regulated thanks to the extension and thanks to our talented developers. Yay!

For example, business owners don’t need to manually convert all their images to webp and scale them down to fit different devices. So, the main idea of ​​using a Magento 2 performance optimization plugin is to minimize the size of the website elements and make them load faster. But this approach has its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages 

• The Google Page Speed ​​plugin comes with a built-in diagnostic tool that will help the store owners to scrutinize their site’s performance without any outside help. That’s so cool.
• The Magento 2 speed optimization extension is designed to solve some website-specific troubles, such as JS and CSS weight. And since it’s open source, one can customize it to suit their needs. Thank God! (Developers)

Disadvantages

• Just like any other Magento extension, the google page speed module requires some technical learning. So the store owner needs to dig more in-depth into the topic of speed optimization with how-to guides.
• As described previously, it only solves the main hardships affecting the site speed, but it cannot resolve difficulties related to the server ability. In this case, one will need technical help.

Now that we have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of Magento 2 performance optimization extensions let us discuss when these google page speed optimization will be more useful.

When Magento 2 performance optimization extension will be more useful?

For a better understanding of whether the extension is enough to assist online business owners to optimize for speed, they can visit Google PageSpeed ​​Insights and test their website. As a result, they’ll get a list of settings that Google recommends them to tweak for better SEO speed and performance. Google Page Speed ​​Optimizer can respond to the following warnings: 

•  Minify JavaScript/CSS/HTML
• Delay the out-of-frame image 
• Remove render-blocking resources 
• The size of the images is correct  
• Stream images in next-generation formats 
• Efficient image encoding 
• Keep the number of requests low and the transfer size small 
• Avoid large network loads 
• In our experience, these issues are most common in new sites and stores with little or no customization.

From our expertise, these issues are most common in new websites and online stores with little or no customization.

Wrap up phrase

Website performance optimization is very essential to conduct regularly, after the successful installation of Magento 2 speed optimization extensions one can conduct the speed optimization process in a few steps. Besides this, the store owners can even try amazing steps to boost up their Magento store speed again taking a few actions for the procedure.