Speed test on our fast loading website.
Is yours a fast loading website?
Fast loading websites are crucial if you want to grab someone’s attention and hold on to it! Most of us are fairly impatient, especially when we’re busy, and when we’re becoming used to having instant information at our fingertips, what can be more annoying than a slow loading website? Test your own website now and count how long it takes to load fully..you might be surprised to find it might take over 10 seconds. You might think 10 seconds is nothing, but believe me that’s a lifetime to some people who might need your services immediately. They might feel there’s something wrong with the site and decide to move to another. A poor functioning site will cause a customer to lose confidence in your company.
There can be many reasons for a slow functioning site, including;
Poor quality hosting – websites stored on old servers. Where your site is hosted and the type of hardware been used can speed up or slow down your site depending on the quality of the hardware. If it’s old hardware it may not be up-to-speed with the most modern browsers people are trying to view your site from. If your server is running old software it will take longer to process requests to your website.
Large images and graphics – For fast loading websites keep an eye on the size of images you use. When you upload images to your site, be sure to check the file size first. Because we’re now able to take high resolution images with our smart phones, the file sizes of these images can be huge and can be far too big for use on a website. You can edit these photos in some photo editing software like Photoshop. Typically your image size should be no more than 150kb but you might find an un-edited image from your phone could be a big as 3000kb! so if you have lots of images like that up there, it will slow everything down.
Poor internet connection – You may be in an area with poor broadband connection. This will obviously slow down everything. Contact your Broadband provider and make sure you have the best package on offer at the moment. Broadband providers won’t necessarily contact you if there’s a better option available that what you’re using currently. For example have a look at eir Fiber: “…you be able to browse and download files quicker, but all other Internet users in the household will experience faster Internet response times. Whether they are using tablets, smartphones or laptops, your entire household will be able to use the Internet simultaneously and benefit from superfast eir Fibre speeds.” http://support.eir.ie/webapp.asp
Is your CMS out of date? – The CMS (Content Management System) is the built in software you use to edit your site. If your site is built on a Wordpress platform, watch out for the update prompts that will be displayed from time to time. These need to be clicked to ensure you’re running on the latest, and therefore most efficient version of the software.
Audit your site – If you’d like us to audit your site and suggest ways of improving it’s speed and general functionality give us a call. We’d be very happy to help you get your site better optimised. Our own website is loading in 1.82 seconds, and that’s with a lot of images up there. We’d like it even faster so we’ll keep working on it till it loads in a blink of an eye! There is no doubt, fast loading websites will keep customers interested for longer.
