How can a team improve website performance?

One of the overlook performance goals at the beginning of any website project is accessibility. In other words, ensuring that whatever website is built, that no technical barriers are erected. Every user, including those with visible disabilities, like no/low vision and invisible disabilities, like colour blindness should be able to use the website. This will ensure higher engagement and user numbers. A good metric would be WACG 2.2 AA.

However, great content, backlinks, and meta descriptions won’t help much if you don’t optimize your website performance. If visitors land on your site and find it takes too long to load, or images don’t display correctly, they’re likely to choose a competitor. That’s why improving your website performance is crucial.

Accessibility compliance checks need to be baked into the build process, at every level. Graphic designers, developers and content producers need to validate their work using WCAG guidelines along the way. This will ensure the finished website will meet accessibility requirements, which in some countries and regions are mandated by law.

Ensure the tools used to communicate are also accessible. Having team members, including those with disabilities, will not only point out compliance issues, but may add to creative solutions and perspectives, overlooked by others. Many solutions, created for those with disabilities benefit everyone. Voice to text, closed captioning and even Siri were developed for the disabled, but used by everyone.

Once a website is launched, it’s important to implement tools that assist content producers from ensuring their content is search engine friendly, performs well and is accessible. These tools can identify trends and help identify areas for further training.

In my experience this are some steps I take in order to improve website performance: 1. Compress images without compromising quality. Use formats like WebP and employ lazy loading to load images only when they come into the user’s view. 2. Enable Gzip compression on your server to reduce the size of your web pages, which speeds up the time it takes to download them. 3. Leverage browser caching to store elements of your site (like images, CSS, JavaScript) in a visitor’s browser, allowing for quicker load times for returning users. 4. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to regularly monitor website performance metrics. Identify areas that need improvement & implement changes accordingly. Do this and more always do the magic for me.

Designers, developers and content producers are typically younger and come from a context that doesn’t think of a quickly aging demographic or those who may have been impacted by the recent pandemic. Using WCAG guidelines will ensure the website is an easy to use, search engine friendly, complies with laws and is just basically a better built website for everyone.