An often overlooked issue online is website speed. In fact, at the time of creating this post, the website you are on is probably having its own speed issues, which I am currently working on. Web page load time has a massive effect on your web business in a couple of major ways. Usability and SEO.
1. Usability – this is by far the most important thing to be thinking about. Amazon and Google recently did tests on their own websites which showed as much as a 20% loss in revenue from a fraction of a second loss in speed. Website users do not like to wait and are growing more and more impatient as bandwidth progresses. In fact, i would step out and say that speed could have one of the biggest impacts on bounce rate, or the rate at which new visitors to your site do not make it past the first page that they came in on. If that first page was slow to load, they are nervous about all other pages they may go to and will likely to decide to find something else to look at.
2. SEO – A websites load time has been a hot topic in the SEO world for at least 5 years now. I believe I am seeing some of the first actual proof of this over the last 6 months. Don’t think the effect is yet profound, but it will be. Put your self in the search engines shoes and the only thing that you want is a good user experience for your searcher so they come back and use your search engine again. Usability, which ties together with website load time, will continue to have a larger impact on SEO than it once did.
How do you speed up your website?
1. Code – make sure your code is clean and is not loading too many external scripts. Everything you have on your site (code, images, java scripts, videos) all play into load time. Make sure you need it before just adding it to your website.
2. Hosting – I have used Godaddy for years, but it is a very poor performing host from a speed standpoint. I would recommend SimpleHelix and Rackspace. You need to get a private server and make sure not to overload it!
You can test your websites speed, versus your competition here – It is a free test and requires no registration
