According to study by Akamai 40% of users will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
Slow loading websites are bad for your business. In a store you will wait a few minutes to speak with a salesperson, but on the web you can simply close the slow loading site and load another site. Why wait when there are so many others sites.
We live in a fast-paced world and the Internet is all about speed and convenience.
Google recently account that a slow loading website can have a negative impact on your Google ranking. Google is constantly working to provide users with the best possible experience, and “fast” is “good”. Click here to read more from Google Blog for Webmasters.
There are couple of reasons for a slow loading website:
- Poorly designed site
- Hosted on an inferior or overloaded server
- Large photos that were not resized, or too many photos on a page
- Flash files
- Large amount of external calls to other websites
It’s expensive to rewrite a poorly built site but there are two easy ways to ensure your site loads quickly. One is use a good hosting company.
Web Hosting as become a commodity and many people are using cheap overloaded hosting solutions. Take a peek at the graphics displaying the load time for a site before they moved to our hosting platform. The site took 5.52 seconds to load, almost 6 seconds.
Would you wait that long to view a page. It’s a beautiful site and worth the wait, but unfortunately, too many left. Now take a look at the load speed after it was moved to our hosting server. The load speed is 730 milliseconds, or LESS THAN ONE SECOND.
Large photos is a huge problem especially with many people uploading photos from their iPhones or digital cameras. There are many free programs that allow you to resize your photos, check to see if one was included with your camera. Many free online programs allow you to reduce the size of your photos as well as make simple edits. I tell my clients to investigate PicMonkey, it’s free and easy to use.
So before you spend a ton of money on a Search Engine Optimization make certain your photos are not too big and you have a good hosting solution. Click here to test the load time of your site.