Is your Website up to Speed?

Recent Google research shows that a slow website results in a considerable fall in traffic.

The search giant's studies show that pages loading just half a second slower than others will see a 20% drop in traffic.

As a result, Google has announced that paid-for ad campaign keywords are to be given a score based on the loading time of landing pages. This means that despite paying more, some website owners will find their sites ranking below faster loading sites in sponsored listings.

Amazon.com came up with comparable research when they conducted a customer experience survey. They carried out tests whereby they delayed page loading times in increments of 100 milliseconds. The results showed that even the smallest delays lead to significant drops in revenue.

Google always advises website owners to focus on user experience and if they are giving preference to quality when it comes to advertising, it has to make sense to focus those same values on organic listings. How fast do your website pages load? Are they providing a positive user experience? Slow pages could lead to poor search engine ranking, so it's time to make sure your website is up to speed!

Firstly, consider the difference between Broadband and dial-up internet access. You must never assume that all your website visitors have Broadband. According to Google Analytics, around 2.15% of website visitors use dial-up so you are well advised to check your Analytics or other statistics reports to see how many of your own visitors form part of this group. If it is a considerable proportion, then you must test your site to see how quickly your pages download on these slower speed connections. However, if the number of visitors using dial-up forms a minority, consider that the benefits of any components integrated into your website that could be causing your slow loading pages will outweigh the slow-load disadvantages.

So, what are these components that could be causing your website pages to load slowly, even on the fastest Broadband speeds? Here are some of the most common culprits:

Images

Web pages that contain multiple images, animated images or pictures that have not been optimised, will prove very slow to download. Images can be reduced in size, cropped and changed to an alternative format in order to reduce the download time.

Flash

Flash is an extremely effective way to create an interactive website and offers great benefits. However, unless designed and applied with the expertise of a specialist Flash website designer, it could prove overly bulky and increase page loading times. True Flash experts know how to incorporate components such as video and audio streaming in such a way that they provide a positive user experience all round.

Web Hosting

Choosing the right hosting is vital. Low cost hosting packages could be of the shared variety and these are notoriously slower than other hosting platforms. Make sure you know what you are buying into with your hosting programme.

Widgets

Widgets bring in media from external websites and whilst they provide great benefits by way of adding searchable content to a website, they can reduce page loading times significantly, even across faster connection speeds.

Embedded External Media

Adding links to things like videos or music from external websites will result in your website speed operating only as fast as the external website that is feeding it. It is preferable to have all content hosted via your own server.

Core Media Design specialises in creating search engine optimised websites. As well as making sure that all of the above mentioned components do not prove an issue for customers' websites, they also ensure the finer, more technical details that could lead to slower loading pages, such as excessive or redundant Java Script or CSS, uncompressed pages and bulky code, never become problem-causing factors.

Published on: Wednesday, 11th March 2009

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