Why everyone is judged against Google

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 that *bleeping* modem. This is great BUT if a website is slow to load users now know it’s the website to blame and not their Internet connection.

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. These databases don’t respond fast enough causing the website to run too slowly. (To find out why databases have problems on shared hosting packages see our post Is Shared Hosting killing your website?). This frustrates users and many of them will leave the website.

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.

One such solution we at Mulreany Consulting have devised is the use of VPS (virtual private servers) as dedicated database servers. Keep all your hosting on your nice and affordable web hosting package and locate your database on a faster database server which should fix your slow website. It’s a simple idea and if you want to find out more check out our post Turbo-Charge Your Website With A VPS Database.