Three things have happened to change the environment for today’s websites: high speed broadband, the explosion of Web 2.0 and the availability of really cheap web hosting. The result is often slow interactive websites that are unfairly judged against the giants of the Internet like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. Is there anything we can do to compete with these big players and provide faster and better websites? Yes there is!
The Evolution of the Web
1. Broadband – a sizable proportion of the population now has access to high-speed Internet access either at home or at work. This means that slow websites can no longer be blamed on poor Internet connections.
2. Web 2.0 – static websites are dead and the Internet is now heaving with e-commerce systems, blogs, forums, knowledge-bases and dynamic websites with live interactive content. Any website worth its salt now has a content management system that allows the website owner to easily and quickly update their content. This means that the majority of websites are now using databases instead of static pages.
3. Cheap web hosting – Web hosting has become ridiculously cheap over the past few years. You can now buy a shared hosting plan from most Irish hosting companies for about €50 per annum and you can put perhaps 30 websites on that package. You often get unlimited databases, lots of disk space and a huge traffic allowance. So you could theoretically have a database-driven website (blog, CMS, ecommerce) hosted and supported for under €2 per annum. How could they possibly provide decent hosting for that price, you may ask. Well as the saying goes, if something looks to be too good to be true it probably is…
The Problem
So here’s the problem. Web hosting companies are supplying extremely cheap hosting and the majority of websites that are running on their servers are using databases. With some hosting companies the database response times are not fast enough due to limitations on numbers of concurrent connections and other limits specified.
Website Load Times
Web Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has this to say in an interview with eConsultancy.com about website load times:
“The rules are; if it is faster than one tenth of a second, you don’t feel like you are waiting at all. If it is more than one tenth of a second, you can tell you are waiting, but up to one second, it still feels like smooth navigation. Between one and ten seconds is the limit for your attention. If you go the best websites, like Google, that’s what they do – they give you the page like that [clicks fingers].”
Everyone Is Judged Against Google
It may seem grossly unfair but now every other website is judged against Google or Amazon and the other ‘big’ websites. If your site is slow to load a page of content and Google can return a web search of the entire Internet in a fraction of a second then it looks bad for you. Google and other such sites are setting the bar very high for the rest of us.
So when your website is slow to respond, the user starts to get impatient. They know it is your website causing the delay because Google loads for them almost instantly. If every page on your website is slow to load because of the poor database responses then the cumulative annoyance will more than likely cause the user to leave. Those users casually browsing will be first to leave followed quickly by those who are genuinely interested in your website but can’t be bothered waiting for every page to load. That may not leave many users to ‘convert’ into paying customers. This would obviously be a disaster for your business and needs to be resolved.
Back to Web 1.0?
Am I suggesting that we abandon interactive websites and we all go back to the ‘good old days’ of Web 1.0 with static websites updated once a century? Definitely not. What we need to do is adapt to the current realities of the web – we need to find technical answers to these problems that are impacting our websites. We may not have the resources Google has but we can all use smarter technology to speed up our websites and improve our users’ experiences online.
Solutions
There are a number of ways to alleviate this problem.
Move your business to a hosting company that has a reputation for fast website serving and good uptime. Check out support forums and online communities to get a gauge for the types of issues other users have with that company. If a lot of customers are complaining about slow load times obviously AVOID that hosting company!
If you are running a WordPress system you could use a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache to speed up your site. This can result in your site responding up to 10 times faster! This works by storing a HTML copy of your dynamic page once it has been loaded so other users can access the HTML version rather than wait for the dynamic page to load. Simple, slick and effective.
Other than that, you should optimise your website graphics, reduce the number of unnecessary scripts and plugins you are using and generally do housekeeping on your website. It all makes a difference.
Regardless of the solution you opt for, website response times can’t be ignored. Google is now using load times as a metric for site rankings so it’s in your interests to fix slow response times.
