How to unlock site performance by improving code health

Your code health has a direct impact on conversion, Google rankings and visitor return rate. If your site is slow, inconsistent or buggy, customers are likely to leave your site before completing their purchase. They will also be harder to win back later. After all, would you go back to a website which was slow and had bugs?

In this article, we will outline how to identify the issues on your site. And more importantly, how to solve them to ensure you have a solid foundation upon which to scale your online business.

Fix the major issues in code health before investing in new designs, functionality or marketing.

Why is this important?

Evaluating your code health is likely to have the biggest return on investment for any site improvement you could make. It can help you to increase your conversation rates and improve your search engine rankings.

Slow, inconsistent and buggy sites deliver a poor experience for your users. This means that investing in bringing new visitors to your eCommerce storefront will be wasted as you introduce more people to the issues. They are not only less likely to convert but it will make it increasingly hard to bring them back to your site in the future.

You only get one chance at a first impression, it is best to make it a good one.

How do you find these issues?

By having an experienced expert review the backend of your set up you can learn what is working correctly and what improvements can be made to improve site speed, user experience, performance and discoverability of your eCommerce store. As a Platinum Certified WooExpert, we see dozens of sites every year which have either not been built in the best way, or have developed issues over the years. In either case, we help identify and resolve core site health issues to ensure a smooth experience for customers, and a solid foundation on which to scale site performance. We do this primarily through an extensive code audit. As well as identifying opportunities to improve site performance, it also allows us to identify potential security weaknesses and therefore avoid expensive security issues later down the line.

Common causes of poor site health

Often the core issues that cause poor site health are related to plugins and integrations in place on the site.

How do you solve site health issues?

For every new business we start working with, we highly recommend a high level code audit to assess code quality and identify core growth barriers. Checking all of these things is likely to result in opportunities to improve overall site speed and performance, ensuring your customer are more likely to complete their order and your Google ranking is more likely to improve.

By conducting a plugin audit, which we do this as part of the code audit, you can discover which plugins are unnecessary. You’ll be able to determine if there may be better options for the functionality that you require and can often condense the amount of plugins needed by utilising a single plugin with multi functionality.

You’ll also to be able to determine whether you have the correct combination of plugins, ensuring there are no conflicts between plugins.

Sometimes, a little custom code can replace the need for weighty plugins, where the plugin is only being used for a small amount of functionality.

And whilst completing a plugin audit we also assess third party integrations on the site looking for opportunities to resolve bugs or speed up the system.

The output from a code audit is a series of prioritised recommendations from critical, high risk issues, down to best in class optimisations. Each with an estimate of what it will take to resolve the issues, along with any any options of approach which might exist. From there, you can decide which improvements to implement based on the ROI for your business. Resolving these kinds of issues is one of our favourite stages of working with new clients. No site is beyond help!