Is the speed of your website important? Nov 16th '09

The speed at which people require information and content is increasing, rapidly. Many studies have shown that slower websites don’t convert as many visitors into clients, but what about websites that aren’t based around a shop?

Over the last few days Google have sparked off rumours that your website loading speed will be a ranking factor within the next 12 months. What does this mean to the average site owner? It will be even more important to ensure that your website loads quickly and is correctly constructed to allow your visitors and search engines to read the content quickly. This can be done by following the check-list below:

5 simple ways to speed up your website

1. Making sure your site is hosted in the country where the majority of your visitors come from.
2. Ensuring that all the images are in the smallest possible format.
3. Removing any bulk code which may be added by site builders such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver.
4. Rearranging Javascript calls so that they load after the content.
5. Minifying (Yes, that’s a word!) Javascript and CSS.

Following these steps above will increase the loading speed of your website, improving the user experience for the visitor as well as (according to rumours) from 2010 improving your search engine ranking. If you aren’t sure how to perform some or any of these quick points then please contact us and we can help you out.

The quicker a page loads the more pages a user will view. With online shops this matters, as more page views can relate to more sales. With brochure type sites the speed doesn’t seem as important, however it is. The quicker a user can get to the information the better the user experience and the more chance that the user will contact you and become a return visitor.

Written by Oliver Culverhouse

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