What is Web Performance Optimization or WPO?

Written by Anastasia Kurmakaeva

Web Performance Optimization is, as its name suggests, the marketing discipline that analyzes a website to recommend changes that help optimize its loading speed. The term WPO became widely known as a result of a Google announcement, which stated that the loading speed of a website was one of the factors that the search engine took into account when positioning Web pages in its serps.

The loading speed of a website is a factor to be taken into account for search engine positioning

In addition, with the advent of mobile devices for surfing the Internet, the loading of websites has become even more important, due to the use of mobile data connections that have more latency than wired networks, making it difficult to load pages.

Another point in favor of applying Web Performance Optimization to a website is the improvement of the user experience, since the longer the loading time, the more users are lost due to the worsening of the user experience. There are studies that speak of user losses of 4.3% due to the increase in the load of a Web in 2 seconds.

One of the most widely used tools in WPO is PageSpeed provided by Google.

This free utility analyzes the chosen Web page, whether it is viewed via mobile device or computer, and results in a score out of 100 points and recommendations for improving the website’s speed.

Another widely used tool is the one provided by PingDom.

This free Web application does provide the speed of the Web in seconds, in addition, it shows the requests to download the files that are made to the server and you can know the time it takes for each one to be downloaded. In the configuration options, the location can be selected in order to choose the one closest to where the target user is located and, in this way, to know more precisely the response time of the Web. A comparison is also made with other websites analyzed in the tool, indicating whether it is above or below average in terms of speed.

Tools such as PageSpeed or PingDom Website Speed test help to measure and improve the speed of a website.

Some of the most important points that are analyzed when performing a WPO analysis of a web page are the following:

First byte load time.
Server configuration.
File weight.
Image resizing.
Number of file uploads.

Although each website requires specific solutions to improve its speed, the following are some of the most common actions that are applied to improve the WPO of websites: