THE NEED FOR SPEED AND WEBSITES
THAT WAS FAST!
Did you know that about 53 percent of tablet and phone users will leave a website, if it takes more than 3 seconds (YES! 3 seconds) to load? So, business owners do have a need for speed! If you want to attract and engage prospective clients, it’s necessary to have a fast loading website. Unfortunately, what engages a viewer and what slow down a website is often the same thing: video and images,
- I’m ready for my close-up! Hosting video on your server is often an easy way to do things; especially on a WordPress site. You simply go to the ADD MEDIA button, an in a short while, you can then add the video to your page. Fast for you, but slower for your visitors. By uploading a video to a video hosting site (such as YouTube or Vimeo), you can add the embed codes to your site. This let’s your website load up faster, while YouTube takes care of the video part on their end. This is a quick and easy fix, especially if you have lots of videos on your website. This can be the difference between your visitor seeing your content or your competitors’ content
- Say Cheese! Have you ever waited around for a huge image file to load on a website? Yes, we all have and it is not a nice feeling (That’s a minute and a half of your life you’ll never get back). What can a website owner do? There are a couple of options:
- Use smaller image files. This will definitely help, but it may provide the viewer with poor quality images.
- Use a content delivery network. A content delivery network (CDN) will help increase the speed of your website by delivering the image to the website and leaving your host to just deliver the page itself. These networks really can deliver much faster than self-hosting the images via your hosting company, but there is usually a cost involved. The costs to range widely from some services offering free accounts and others up to several hundreds of dollars a month. Just search the web for details on dozens of companies.
A simple way to put the concept here is that if you get the big files off your server and let someone else, who is better equipped, load them, your page will load faster.
SHARING IS CARING! – NOT SO MUCH!
Another factor can be the hosting server a website is stored on. Is it a shared server or a dedicated server? A shared server allows many websites to be stored on a single server. This reduces cost; but it also can increase your website’s load time; especially if there are some big sites on the server, with lots of videos and big image files. A dedicated server is more expensive, but you do get better load times and usually more space to store your website.
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!
And there are other factors that can also slow down load time; such as the coding language the site is written in, caching options and compression options. I will not go into these and other factors, because most business owners will not be able to do anything about these by themselves. Contact a qualified website specialist to go after these issues. You may find you have to get a new website built for you based on newer coding options.
The fixes I mentioned in detail above, are things that any slightly savvy business owner can take care of by themselves, and they will improve your website’s loading speed.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING
Finally, if a business has a slower loading website, then he has a bigger problem: GOOGLE! Yes, one of the factors that Google now uses to rank websites is loading speed (especially on mobile). Google sees it like this, they want to give the person who is searching Google the best experience possible. A slower website means a poorer experience, a poorer experience means the website deserves a lower ranking.
WHERE DO YOU STAND?
Precision Internet Marketing does offer a free speed check and analysis of your website. Simply, click the link below, and enter the URL of your website in the free Analysis form. You will receive your score and some suggestions on how to improve your website.
https://precisioninternetmarketing.com/services/search-engine-optimization/