In a world where more and more households are connected to the
internet, bandwidth is becoming an issue and brownouts have been
predicted to occur in the next few years. With the strain on the
infrastructure of the internet this makes having an efficient,
fast loading website all that much more important.
The bottom line for most site owners though, is not the
efficiency of the internet as a whole, but rather the financial
sustainability of their websites. While there are many ways to
make a site perform better in terms of converting visitors, one
of the simplest, and probably most important aspects is simply
to reduce the load time of your website. If your site suffers from poor performance, you could be missing
out not only on sales and average visitor time on site, but also
search rankings. Below I will discuss some of the negative
impacts a slow loading site may experience, as well as a few
ways you can correct the issue. In some cases, correcting the
problem will cost you only some time, although it has the
potential to really pay off in the long run. Negative Impacts of Long Load Times
If your site takes too long to load this can have a number of
negative effects including loss of sales, loss of rankings, and
increased pay per click cost. It can even increase your hosting
costs depending on the cause. Loss of Sales
Let's pretend for a moment that search engines just didn't exist
and rankings didn't matter. People are impatient - if your site
takes too long to load, many potential customers will simply
give up and go elsewhere. Broadband connections are growing incredibly fast in the US;
however, according to a study posted at FoxNews
(http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,375624,00.html) this past
July, approximately 10% of Americans still have dial-up internet
access. If your site loads slowly, you may be alienating 10% of
your potential customers. The last thing you want to do is frustrate your visitors. If you
do this, you may drive them away, never to return. If you can
provide a fast loading efficient website, you will increase the
likelihood that your visitors will make a purchase, and return
again in the future. Increased Pay per Click Costs
Only a few short months ago a post by Heather Lane at the Inside
AdWords blog (http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/06/
landing-page-load-time-now-affects.html) announced that landing
page load times will affect a keyword's quality score. The
reason for this is quite simple: a fast loading website improves
the end user experience. As a result, ads directing to a slow
loading page will be given a lower quality score. This in turn
will cause your keyword bids to be higher, costing you
significantly on a per click basis. Loss of Organic Rankings
We know two things for a fact. Google factors in load times with
AdWords, and Google focuses on an improved end user experience.
As a result, I for one am convinced that a site's load time does
impact overall organic search rankings. While this is likely
only a small piece of the very large algorithmic puzzle, it does
play a part, and if you can speed up your site, you just may be
able to move your rankings up a notch or two. Speeding up your site is unlikely to move your site from page 8
all the way to page 1, but it may be enough to move up a few
positions. Increased Hosting Costs
Assuming your load times are due to file size issues and not
other server constraints, your hosting costs may be more than
they need to be. This factor will vary a great deal based on the
hosting company and the package you have chosen. Many hosts now offer packages where a significant amount of
bandwidth usage is included, resulting in a single flat monthly
or annual rate. (LunarPages (http://news.stepforth.com/exit/
lunarpages.php) for example, has a $4.95 monthly plan with
unlimited bandwidth per month.) If your hosting provider does
put a limit on usage and you are using beyond the allocated max,
you could be paying a fair bit in overage charges. If you fall
into this category, optimizing your files to reduce bandwidth
usages could save you a considerable amount of cash. Issues and Fixes
There are a number of issues that can cause a site to load
slowly. Below I have noted a few items that are fairly common
and can be relatively easily corrected. Issue: Un-Optimized Images
This is probably one of the biggest culprits out there impacting
load time today. I have seen countless websites where image
optimization is simply not done, resulting in significantly
increased page load times. One of the biggest problems is when
images are scaled down to fit the application. Quite often webmasters will take a large image, and scale it
down using the height and width attributes rather than
physically resizing the image. What this does is then require
the browser to load the full high resolution image, when it
really only needs a fraction.
Let's take this real world example. A client recently had a
photo on their home page; the photo was 600 x 403 pixels,
weighed in at 124.68 KB, and visually they had scaled the image
to fit 473 x 317 pixels. By resizing the original image to the desired dimensions, and
then reducing the quality of the jpg to 70%, the end result was
an image that looked identical on his website but weighed in at
only 23 KB - that's 101.68 KB smaller than the original. Using a
simple filesize download calculator (http://www.onlineconversion.com/
downloadspeed.htm) I found online, 101.68 KB would take 14
seconds to download using a 56 Kb modem, or about 2 seconds on
your run of the mill broadband connection. For broadband users 2 seconds may not seem like much, but
remember, this is only for a single image. When you add up all
other images and on-site components, the time can significantly
add up. Issue: Un-Optimized files
Another way you can speed up your sites load time is to have
clean HTML, CSS, and other included files. Remove extraneous
code from your files, and use CSS wherever possible. Every piece
of old html code adds up in size, even if it doesn't impact the
visual site itself. I have seen many cases where links have been
removed but the code remains accidentally, leaving something
like:
This code, as tiny as it is, does contribute to an increase in
load time (and in this specific example, could also be seen as
spam by search engines). If your site makes use of CSS, consider compressing it to save
on load times. You can do this by grouping identical styles to
save space. For instance,
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Scott Van Achte is the Senior SEO at StepForth Web Marketing Inc.
based in Victoria, BC, Canada and founded in 1997. You can read
more of Scott's articles and those of the veteran StepForth team
at http://news.stepforth.com or contact us at
http://www.stepforth.com/ .
Tel - 250-385-1190, Toll Free - 877-385-5526, Fax - 250-385-1198
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