subject: How fast is your website? [print this page] How fast is your website? How fast is your website?
When we analyse websites, one of the things we look at is how long it takes for the web pages to load. Why? Well the main reason used to be that website visitors get bored waiting - well don't you? You only have about 3 seconds to get your key messsage across, so if that time isspent waiting for images to load up, you may have lost your opportunity - some people just won't wait.
It's now become even more of an issue though, as slow-loading pages could seriously affect your Search engine Optimisation. Google's stated aim is to deliver information to searchers as quickly as possible, and now includes page-loading time as one of the factors it considers is evaluating your web pages.
Have you checked your website pages recently?
One of the mistakes companies often make is that they forget to opytimise images when the add them to the site. This can have a dramatic effect on page loading time.
Is your hosting service fast and reliable?
Always use business class hosting services, which have the bandwidth necessary to enable your site to load quickly, regardless of how many people are trying to view it. Downtime is another potential problem - if someone tries to access your site and it's not available, they may not try again. And this also affect Search engine robots - if your site is unavailable when the robot is trying to crawl your pages, what impression does that give?
Some one asked me last week about whether they should host their website on their own server. I'll repeat here what I said to them
"I would normally advise clients against hosting on their own servers, because usually they don't have the infrastructure to support it. Things to consider include:
Bandwidth and performance do you have a high speed internet connection? If not, your web pages could be slow to load
How reliable is your server? Can you be sure that the site will always be available? Do you have an uninterruptable power source?
Cost do you have windows server software already? If you have a content management system for the website, you may also need SQL server - both of these can add to your costs
What will happend if your server goes down out of office hours - will you know about it?Will you be able to attend to it?"
All hosting servers have problems from time to time very often caused by external conditions. Professional hosting companies offer 24x7 support to resolve any issues, maintain back-ups, keep their microsoft patches up to date etc etc, so they're well worth the money in my view!
How can you check your website's performance?
There are some tools available to help you to check the performance of your web pages - just Google "web page loading times" and you'll see some. Google Webmaster tools is also a great source of information.
By making your pages quick to load and consistently available, you're improving the user experience as well as keeping search engines happy - sounds good to me!
If you have any concerns about your website performance or hosting service, we can run some tests for you and we'll also let you have some information about the managed hosting services available from WSI.
