Beginners guide to Web Hosting

why speed optimisation is important?

Have you ever clicked on a search listing, waited for a couple of seconds and then given up and clicked on the next option?

Have you ever seen a website start to load, realised it was too slow and clicked the back button?

Unless you have a fast website you’re losing visitors

Lost visitors: It stands to reason that if your visitors are clicking the back button after trying to look at your site you have lost them, maybe to your competitors. All that hard work that you put into your search engine optimisation will be wasted… any money that you spent on advertising, Google Adwords or developing the content of your site goes down the drain. Whilst most people spend a considerable amount of time and money on SEO and promotion, only a small fraction of them consider the reliability and speed of their website itself. Making a tiny saving on getting some cheap hosting may prove a false economy if you’re losing traffic due to a slow or unreliable web server. A small amount of time and/or money to spend optimising the pages for speed is a good investment.

Better SEO rankings: Do the search engines favor faster sites? Matt Cutts from Google recently said, “Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.” So I would say “yes they do”, if not now then very soon. In addition, search engines monitor the bounce rates of pages- it makes sense that if a page has a high bounce rate when listed for a particular search term then it should be relegated against a site with a low bounce rate. All in all your pages should load quickly!

Pay less on AdSense PPC: The order of the sponsored listings from Google Adwords PPC program are determined using two metrics- bid price and quality score. These metrics are multiplied to create a value which is then used to determine the position that the advert will fall. It is now believed that Google penalises slow sites or sites with a high bounce rate by reducing the quality score- this means that for the same money the adverts may find themselves further down the list. On the flip side, a fast site pays less money to get closer to the top!

How quick? People are different- some are patient and some are not. Some will wait half an hour for a page to load and some will not wait 1 second. So how fast should your site be? Well, considering that as loading time increases so does the number of people giving up, then as fast as possible. Reducing loading from 2 seconds to 1 second probably won’t make as much difference as reducing 3 seconds to 2 seconds so in our opinion you should not sacrifice the look or functionality of your site because of an obsession with loading speed- most people will wait a little while, so complete all of the steps in this guide to make your present site faster and see how it goes. Do you feel the need for speed? Then read on…

Next section: Factors dictating website loading speeds

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