From persuading consumers to move forward with becoming a new patient, to continuing to be a central hub for engagement, your medical practice website is more than just a digital brochure; it’s part of the patient journey. This article offers practical strategies to assess and improve website performance, maximizing its effectiveness for your healthcare business goals.
Why Your Practice’s Website Performance and Speed Are Important
High speed internet and fast loading pages have set consumer expectations for digital tools’ performance, including websites. It has been found that site visitors can lose focus on a still-loading page in anywhere from 3 seconds to as little as 0.3 seconds. Aside from creating an awkward situation that impacts the patient experience, it can also send a prospective patient immediately to the next provider on their list – your competitor.
While it may seem like a few more seconds of loading time is not consequential, keep in mind that you are contending with short attention spans. Optimal loading speed is crucial for website health and enhances user experience, which in turn supports search engine optimization (SEO) performance. Google uses “bounce rate” data to assess if a website meets users’ needs. If too many visitors leave your page due to slow loading, your search ranking can drop, reducing your chances of reaching new patients. Factors affecting website speed include:
- Unnecessary HTTP requests
- Slow server processing times
- Resource-demanding image file sizes
- Inefficient code
Website administrators can dive deeper into site quality performance by looking into additional aspects such as Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. By gauging how your website fares in these areas, your website administrator can improve website performance.
How To Test Your Website’s Performance and Speed
While visiting your own website gives you some idea about your current page load speeds, it won’t necessarily tell you if your page is performing optimally or not. To get raw data on the current state of your website’s overall performance, try these web-based tools:
- Google PageSpeed Insights: This tool offers a detailed analysis of your website’s performance on both desktop and mobile devices. It provides actionable recommendations to enhance speed and efficiency.
- WebPageTest: This tool allows you to run performance tests from multiple locations and browsers, giving you a well-rounded view of your site’s loading times and bottlenecks.
- Pingdom: A user-friendly tool that provides insights into your website’s performance, including load time, page size, and the number of requests made.
These tools provide detailed reports on various performance metrics, including load times, rendering speeds, and optimization suggestions. Tech specialists such as website administrators can help you better interpret what these numbers indicate and take steps to improve website performance.
8 Fundamental Website Speed Optimization Best Practices
What aspects can be modified to improve website performance? Like a sprint runner, you can consider what may be slowing you down by looking to internal and external factors such as:
- Reduce the number of HTTP requests: Every element on your web page—images, scripts, stylesheets—requires an HTTP request. Minimizing these requests will significantly boost your site’s speed. Switch to HTTP/2 to increase website performance, as it allows multiple requests to be sent simultaneously over a single connection.
- Optimize image sizes: Image size can drastically slow down your website. Compress and resize images to their intended display dimensions, use modern formats like WebP, and implement lazy loading to ensure images only load when they are in the user’s viewport.
- Utilize a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN stores copies of your website on servers in many geographical locations, delivering content to users from the nearest web server. This reduces latency and load times, providing consistent user experience worldwide.
- Choose the right hosting service plan: Your hosting service plays a significant role in website performance. Opt for a plan that offers adequate resources and support. Minimize time to first byte (TTFB) by selecting a plan that ensures fast server response times and enabling Gzip compression to reduce the size of files sent from the server.
- Minify and combine files: Reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files by minifying them—removing unnecessary characters like spaces and comments. Combining multiple files into one can also reduce the number of HTTP requests.
- Load JavaScript asynchronously: Loading JavaScript files asynchronously allows other elements of the page to load without waiting for the script to finish. This ensures that critical content is displayed promptly, enhancing user experience.
- Implement prefetch, preconnect, and prerender techniques: These techniques prepare the browser to load content more efficiently. Prefetching resources that might be needed soon, preconnecting to required origins, and prerendering pages can drastically improve load time experience.
- Enable browser cache: Caching stores static files so they can be quickly accessed without reloading from the server. Implement both browser caching and server-side caching to reduce load times for returning.
Like preparing for a sprint race, working with an experienced trainer can help you address areas that slow you down, and likewise, technical website experts can better assist in optimizing your website.
The Importance of Continuous Monitoring and Optimization
Improving website performance is an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring, implementing changes, and comparing performance before and after modifications. Working with your website administrators, you can establish a routine for testing page speed, analyzing performance metrics, and identifying areas for further website performance optimization.
Continuously monitor user behavior and feedback to identify potential performance issues and prioritize improvements accordingly. Tools like Google Analytics and Heatmaps can provide valuable insights into where user experience may be impacted.
Summary: How to Optimize Page Speed to Improve Website Performance
A website is more than just a digital brochure, it’s an effective healthcare business tool that intersects with the patient journey. As a core component of website performance, site speed impacts the user experience which, in turn, impacts how likely a potential patient is to find your website in search. Improving website performance helps your healthcare business to better serve your current patients and to attract new patients more effectively. These tips can direct your website administrators on how to improve website performance:
- Website speed and user experience: A fast-loading website is critical, especially in healthcare, where current patients need easy-to-access assistance, and potential patients are comparing your medical practice to the competition.
- Testing tools: Utilize tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, and Pingdom to assess your site’s performance to get an accurate composite of your current website performance.
- Image optimization: Images make your website look professional and polished, but when file sizes exceed set thresholds, this can slow down site loading and intrude on the user experience. Compress and resize images using tools like ImageOptim or TinyPNG to maintain quality without sacrificing speed.
- Reducing HTTP requests: Streamline your site by removing unnecessary scripts and plugins.
- Caching: Implement caching plugins to store static files and speed up page load times.
- HTTP/2 and CDNs: Switch to HTTP/2 and utilize a content delivery network (CDN) to enhance performance.
- Minification and asynchronous loading: Minify JavaScript, HTML and CSS files, and load JavaScript asynchronously to improve load times.
- Advanced techniques: Use prefetching, preconnecting, and prerendering to optimize how quickly content on the page loads for the user.
- Continuous monitoring: Regularly monitor your website’s performance, analyze metrics, and make ongoing optimizations for continuous improvement.
Working with professionals experienced in website management, you can streamline your website performance efforts and piece together a maintenance schedule to keep this key engagement tool running optimally.
Building a More Competitive Healthcare Business Starts with a Better Website
When a potential patient visits your website, they immediately begin to form opinions about your business. Websites that appear outdated or function poorly may suggest to patients that your medical practice is inattentive to important details and not interested in meeting consumer expectations.
iHealthSpot’s team of medical practice website experts can turn your basic site into a powerful business asset through key optimizations designed to convert website visitors into new patients. And to drive more traffic to your website, we employ other cost-effective online strategies to help you build a competitive edge in your local market. Contact us today to learn more.
