Web developers and engineering team leaders — when you think of website performance optimization, what comes to mind? 

Optimizing your website’s performance is about delivering a top-notch user experience, ensuring your content is accessible to all users, ensuring your site ranks well in search engines, and, ultimately, driving business success. Improving your site’s performance is paramount not just for users, but for your business as a whole since a mere 1-second delay in page load time can lead to a 26% reduction in conversions. 

In this guide, we’ll explore how Lumar’s suite of website health tools — particularly Lumar Analyze and Lumar Protect — help developers streamline their website performance optimization. 

But before we delve into the platform itself, let’s first acknowledge the challenges that developers encounter when it comes to optimizing their websites’ performance — and how Lumar helps website teams address these issues.

3 website optimization challenges commonly faced by developers

1. Balancing technical excellence and efficiency

As a developer, you’re responsible for ensuring that your website operates flawlessly from a technical perspective. However, you also need to work efficiently to meet project deadlines and evolving requirements. Striking the right balance between technical excellence and efficiency can be a constant challenge.

2. Navigating complex SEO and accessibility demands

Meeting the demands of both SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web accessibility can be complex — these aspects of web development may often seem like ‘secondary’ concerns to developers, but chances are, you’ll be receiving increasing pressure from your business leadership teams to address both of these areas in the months and years to come as new search engine updates require adjustments in SEO strategies and new government guidelines for digital accessibility make it ever more crucial for businesses to adhere to WCAG rules. 

Technical SEO requires a lot of developer involvement — these are the elements of SEO that go far beyond keywords and content, and will need developers’ help to implement sitewide changes. This means optimizing for Google’s Core Web Vitals, site architecture, crawlability, indexability, page experience, and more.  

Website accessibility, too, requires developers’ skills to implement ARIA best practices and sitewide processes and structures that support compliance with W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). 

3. Aligning and collaborating with cross-functional digital teams

Developers can sometimes work in silos and have communication gaps with SEOs, accessibility specialists, digital marketers, and business leadership teams. But when so much of a business’s reputation and success relies on its digital channels, this lack of cross-team communication can lead to even more developer tickets and an ever-growing backlog. 

Getting cross-functional website stakeholders aligned on priorities and goals can save time for all involved — but this can be difficult to achieve when there is no shared ‘central source of truth’ when it comes to website health metrics.  

Lumar: Your all-in-one website intelligence platform

Lumar is a comprehensive website intelligence platform powered by the fastest website crawler on the market — with crawl speeds up to 450 URLs/second (for non-rendered content) and  350 URLs/second (for rendered content). For developers working on extra-large enterprise sites with thousands — or millions — of URLs, Lumar’s crawl speeds can be a game changer for working efficiently. 

Lumar enables you to analyze, benchmark, monitor, and protect your website’s crucial technical foundations — including both technical SEO and accessibility metrics — all from one powerful platform. 

The full Lumar platform is comprised of four apps: 

• Lumar Analyze: Quickly uncover the technical issues that are impacting your website’s search ranking, user experience, and accessibility compliance.
• Lumar Monitor: Easily spot changes & track website health and accessibility trends — across all your domains & projects.
• Lumar Protect: Automated QA testing that helps prevent traffic-sapping tech SEO mistakes or accessibility issues from being published to your live site. Save time and  improve cross-team relationships by reducing the need for more tickets or roll-backs.
• Lumar Impact: Take your website data further with Lumar features that showcase the impact of your website projects, including industry-specific benchmarks and website health scores.

All four Lumar apps can be used with views of technical SEO or website accessibility metrics, streamlining the process of gathering insights into your site’s overall technical health and simplifying workflows for cross-functional website teams by creating a single source of truth for all your primary technical site health metrics in one place.

How to use Lumar for technical SEO

Click through the “Lumar for SEO” product tour below to explore the platform features relating to tech SEO and overall website technical health.

How to use Lumar for web accessibility compliance

Click through the “Lumar for Accessibility” product tour below to explore how you can use Lumar to improve your website’s accessibility and WCAG compliance.

For web development teams, Lumar Analyze and Lumar Protect are particularly helpful tools… 

Lumar Analyze: Helping developers uncover optimization opportunities in record time

Why website optimization matters: 

According to a 2023 Statista survey, the longer users have to wait for a page to load, the more likely they are to leave the site, with the drop-off rate significantly increasing around the 5-second mark.

As a website developer or development team leader, achieving peak site performance and ensuring digital accessibility compliance are key objectives.

Here’s how Lumar Analyze can help you achieve these goals:

Scaling website intelligence and optimization

Lumar Analyze empowers development teams to gain comprehensive insights into a website’s technical health at an enterprise scale. It enables you to crawl millions of URLs, schedule crawls as needed, and provides invaluable insights into the technical elements of your site that are failing to reach their potential.

Key takeaway: Lumar Analyze can crawl millions of pages at speeds of up to 450 URLs per second, offering a fast and comprehensive view of your site’s technical health.

Prioritizing & resolving technical issues and accessibility compliance

Identifying technical SEO issues and accessibility barriers is crucial for user satisfaction, search engine rankings, and ensuring your site can drive sales and revenue for the business. 

But identifying issues is only part of the battle — website teams need to resolve these problems! Developers are often contending with large backlogs and ticket requests, making issue prioritization a challenge. Using Lumar Analyze in conjunction with Lumar Impact helps website teams solve the challenge of issue prioritization:

• Organic Traffic Funnel Visualizations: The organic traffic funnel view within Lumar’s Analyze app gives users more visibility into the potential impact website changes could have on their organic search visibility. See where website issues fall on the organic traffic funnel to better prioritize your areas marked for improvement. And effectively communicate your progress to leadership with easy-to-understand graphs.
• Website Health Scores:  Lumar’s website health scores provide a mark out of 100 for specific areas of your website’s technical health, aligned to the traffic funnel. This helps you identify key areas for investigation to drive improvements and increase conversions.
• Industry Benchmarks: Lumar Impact’s website industry benchmarks help you benchmark success against top players in your specific industry and show you exactly how your site’s technical fundamentals compare to top players in your field so you can quickly identify which site improvements can help you get ahead of the competition.
• AI-Assisted Website Accessibility Recommendations: Spending hours scouring WCAG documentation to fix your website’s accessibility issues? Save serious time with Lumar’s AI-powered website accessibility suggestions, tailored to each unique accessibility issue you uncover on your site. 

Key takeaway: With over 200 built-in reports and customizable extractions, Lumar Analyze offers in-depth analysis of your site’s technical health and accessibility metrics. Further Lumar tools (including health scores, industry benchmarks, traffic funnel visualizations, and AI tools) help web teams prioritize the issues uncovered in website crawls for efficient, effective task management. 

Platform customization for efficiency

Lumar is a great platform for flexibility and customization. Users can customize their website crawls with segmentation, allowing you to easily conduct analyses on specific page types across your website and quickly focus on priority pages and site sections — without having to wait for a crawl of your entire site to finish. 

You can also set up custom extractions with Lumar’s web crawler to pull data on just about any aspect of your website that you’d like using customized regex rules. 

Key takeaway:  Crawl segmentation and custom extraction capabilities in Lumar ensure that development teams can target their most important metrics quickly.

Unifying data sets for deeper insights

Lumar is a great tool to build a centralized source of truth when it comes to your website’s technical health, with technical SEO, accessibility, and broader website health metrics all built into the platform. Further integrations with external data platforms like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Looker Studio, Adobe Analytics, Logz.io, Tableau, and more enable you to combine even more data sets with your Lumar data for a comprehensive view of your website’s health and performance. 

Key takeaway: Unifying data sets provides a holistic view of your website’s health and performance, helping you make informed optimizations.

Streamlined developer task management

Managing developer, SEO, and other team members’ tasks during a website audit is simplified with Lumar Analyze. You can easily create, assign, and prioritize tasks using the Lumar Task Manager.

Key takeaway: Lumar’s Task Manager helps you increase productivity by scheduling and assigning tasks to relevant team members based on real report data, from directly within the Lumar app. Tasks can be created from any of the Lumar reports and users can be automatically notified of updates for either specific tasks or all tasks. 

Lumar Protect: Preventing SEO mistakes and accessibility issues before they go live on your site

SEO mistakes can negatively impact your website’s organic search rankings, which can lead to a decline in search traffic and a reduction in revenue for your business. 

 Accessibility issues can similarly impact your business’s bottom line, since 83% of users with accessibility requirements limit their shopping to sites they know are barrier-free. 

Here’s how Lumar Protect can help you prevent costly SEO and accessibility mistakes with automated QA testing:

Embracing automation to mitigate risks

Lumar Protect introduces a new era of website health automation with time-saving automated QA tests for both technical SEO and accessibility. It gives engineering managers the power to stop technical SEO and accessibility issues before they are released onto your live site, reducing the risk of traffic losses, usability flaws, and accessibility non-compliance, while saving developers time by reducing the number of ‘issue fix’ tickets that land in their queues post-launch. 

Key takeaway: Lumar Protect offers over 300 built-in automated QA tests for SEO and accessibility, so developers can take a time-saving, proactive approach to website health. 

Customizable QA thresholds for maximum control

Customizable quality thresholds in Lumar Protect enable you to set specific QA standards for your website, giving you control over what ‘passes the test’ for SEO and accessibility standards within your organization. 

Depending on the QA thresholds you set in the platform, QA tests will either warn you of errors in the new code or can be set to automatically stop the release if any critical tests fail. 

Key takeaway: Smart QA testing thresholds in Lumar Protect provide flexibility in maintaining a high level of quality assurance across your website.

Fostering collaboration between developers, SEOS, and broader teams

Maintaining your site’s technical health is a collaborative effort. Lumar Protect helps align developers, SEOs, accessibility specialists, and broader web teams on best practices and quality guidelines.

Key takeaway: Improved alignment across website teams with Lumar Protect fosters collaboration and ensures smoother website development and optimization processes.

A proactive approach to website health

Prevention is often more effective than reactive problem-solving. Lumar Protect allows you to set up automated tests to catch mistakes before they impact your site’s traffic and conversions.

Key takeaway: Lumar enables developers to take a more proactive approach to managing their websites’ technical health and accessibility, and can significantly reduce the time and effort spent on firefighting down the road.

Final Thoughts: Using Lumar as a developer toolkit

In today’s competitive digital landscape, optimizing website performance is non-negotiable. Lumar’s robust website health platform, including the Lumar Analyze and Protect apps, offers a comprehensive solution for developers and development team leaders. By leveraging these tools, you can streamline your website health and optimization workflows, boost overall performance, and better ensure accessibility compliance, ultimately driving more traffic, revenue, and success for your business.

Don’t wait to enhance your website’s technical health. Get a demo of Lumar’s platform today and discover the positive impact the right tools can have on your website’s performance.

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• Source: https://www.lumar.io/blog/best-practice/developers-guide-to-lumar-website-performance-optimization/