Find more business and save money with a faster website

January 22, 2010

The speed your website, shopping cart and/or blog load for your visitors is important. Here are a few reasons:

Visitors are trying to find a solution to their needs. The amount of data on the web is enormous. To find what they are look for, visitors typically wait not more than 3 seconds (usually closer to 1 second!). They want to see if your site meets their needs and if your site doesn’t load fast enough, they’ll move on.
Some part of your site may take longer to load than other parts. If one part is too slow, your site will appear broken for a moment. A broken site does not look good. They move on.
Visitors associate fast loading times with higher credibility. If you have a shopping cart and your site takes too long to load, your visitors might assume you don’t have enough to spend on hosting costs. And if you don’t have enough for quality hosting, they’ll go a step further and think you might not be spending enough on security and their personal data might not be safe. So they move on.
If you think your site loads “well enough” for you, it might. But for the visitor across the country or even across the globe, it might not load fast enough. This degrading performance is due to network latency; the farther your visitor is from your actual server location, the longer the website will take to load as the data has to travel a larger distance.
Eventually, you will notice a poorly performing site. If you talk to your hosting company, they will tell you to upgrade to a larger hosting package. So now you’re spending $25-50 more each month to get the performance you’re looking for. Instead you could improve the performance of your site and likely stay at the more affordable hosting package.

There are a number of relatively quick fixes that can be done to optimize your website. Optimizing will improve your bottom line by:

Keeping visitors on your site longer
Improving your credibility
Appealing to a larger geographic market
Save you money on hosting fees

We offer a website tuning package for $140. In this package we will we:

Create a Content Distribution Network account for you to serve your files from many different servers across the globe.
Tune your static files for optimizing web requests
Tune your webserver settings to improve speed and the size of your website files (Note: we may only be able to accomplish this task if your hosting company supports it. If it doesn’t, think about switching to OceanTara or another robust and flexible account!).