A lot has been written about how important it is for a website to be easy to navigate, mobile friendly, and secure, but one thing that webmasters often overlook is the speed with which their website loads. This should be one of the first things that your webdesign company discusses with you after the site’s look and feel.
A slow-loading website could well be driving customers away, and it could even be hampering your rankings in the search results. Slow loading times increase your bounce rate, and this makes your page look like it is lower quality to Google. On mobile phones, a slow website is the kiss of death. It can drive as much as 80 per cent of visitors away, never to return.
Speeding Up Your Website
The good news is that there are a lot of things you can do to speed up your website. In some cases, the fix might be as simple as changing to a hosting provider that is closer to where your customers are located, but in many cases, there are far simpler ways to improve your site’s performance.
A good designer, such as http://www.viziononline.co.uk will look at the technical aspects of your site. If you use WordPress, do you have caching turned on? If your site uses something more advanced such as Magento, is the server’s back end configured correctly to support such a demanding platform? Are your images properly optimised?
Testing Your Site
These are things that could be causing a slowdown of your website, and they are all quite easy to fix. Other common quick fixes include setting up a content delivery network (CDN) that will cache files that rarely change in several servers located all over the country – such as static web pages, images, and JavaScript – thereby taking the load off your server and minifying JavaScript so that the total download is smaller.
If you are concerned about the performance of your website, you can use speed tests such as the YSlow browser plugin to give you an idea of what problems your website has and then send the report to your web design team. The insights that YSlow gives will help your designers identify the problems and speed up your site so that your customers don’t get frustrated when they are trying to buy from you.