Fixing Site Load Time

Fixing site load time is a priority for websites. This might be the only thing that separates your company from becoming the market leader in your industry.

What happens to your SEO if your site is slow?

Google has stated years back that page speed is a crucial consideration for ranking. Since 2010, it has been practiced by Google to also check the loading time of websites. Slower sites have a lower chance of getting ranked, while faster websites can get better ranking, considering that all things are equal. Since SEO is quite important for every website, the sooner your website loads, the better it is.

User experience

Why would Google be very particular about the website’s loading time? Simple. It affects overall user experience. And since Google invests on user experience to boost its popularity, websites that take a while to load don’t usually get the top spot in the search results.

A lot of users usually can’t wait for a page that takes a few seconds to load. Given the highly competitive nature of today’s industries, having a slow website can make people leave your site, and therefore you wasted the chance of convincing them to buy your products, or avail of your services.

In fact, according to studies, 1 microsecond is equivalent to around 1% decline in sales. Just to give you an idea why it is crucial for your site to load faster these days, let’s compare how online users behave during the late 90s and around 10 years ago.

In 1999, 66% of online users are already satisfied when the page loads within 8 seconds. By 2006, 33% of website visitors already leave the website if a site fails to load more than 4 seconds.

How fast is fast? If your website takes around 5 seconds to load, it is only faster than 25% of the rest of the websites online. By improving your loading time to 1.7 seconds, this already puts you ahead of 75% of other websites found on the World Wide Web.

What affects your site’s loading time?

There are many factors that can affect your site’s loading time. Website hosting is one of those things. What makes hosting such an important factor? As rule of thumb, the website should be up 99.99% of the time. It should only have a few times wherein it is down.

How exactly does hosting works? Your hosting option affects how fast your website is going to load. Typically, when someone types your website’s URL, it sends a request via the website’s server. Now, if your hosting is a bit sloppy, there’s a chance that your website is going to load slowly.

The distance can also be a factor. For instance, if your market and usual traffic are from Asia, it is also a good idea that you turn to hosting sites based in Asia as well. For companies that offer products worldwide, it’s a good idea to have a host that is located halfway across the world.

Another factor that can affect your site’s loading time is the number of files that you use on your website. The more photos and videos that you use on your site, the more likely it is going to slow down. There’s a solution to this problem. For photos, it is possible to make the files smaller in order to make things a bit “lighter” for your site. As for videos, you can opt to just use YouTube or Vimeo when incorporating videos on your site.

Traffic can also be the cause of your website’s lagging. A lot of startup businesses set a limit to the amount of data that can be transferred in a day or month. If this is the one causing your website to slow down, make sure that you make the right adjustment since the right traffic is always a good sign for enterprises.

Modern Web Design and Development Practices

Flash is a browser-heavy application. Over the years, Google also prefers not to rank websites made of this application. If you wish to make the website perform faster, it is crucial to use HTML5.

If you find your website with these problems, it is a good idea that you rely on our modern website design and development practices. We offer website management that gives you the opportunity to load your site fast enough to not lose your customers.