Saturday, January 11, 2014

The Important Role of Site Speed in the Success of Your Website



Websites are getting increasingly complex and are competing with each other to provide better content and user experience to visitors. A lot of this content consists of bulky, high-quality multimedia that can drastically reduce website speed. Website speed optimization services are essential if you want your website to provide a good overall user experience. A sluggish website can turn off visitors, which will in turn adversely affect your sales.


Why Website Optimization Is Important for Increasing Conversion Rates
Unlike a decade back, these days, people use websites on the move and in a hurry. Most website visitors are impatient and not all of them have fast internet access speeds. There are many competing websites on the internet. If your website does not provide what visitors are looking for in reasonable time, chances are that they will move on to some other website. This will in all probability be your competitor's website.

Experienced web developers and online marketers say that the time you have to convince your visitor to stay on and read the content on your site is just eight to 10 seconds. Many websites take more than this to load completely. How can they expect to get good conversion rates?

The very fact that Google Analytics gives statistics about website load performance highlights the need for fast websites. Your website is also the face of your business in the online world. When your visitors see that it takes a lot of time to load, they often regard this as a deficiency of service and judge your business accordingly. A slow website can thus hurt your online as well as offline reputation.

Improve Website Performance and Get Better Rankings from Search Engines
Many people are not aware that site speed plays an important role in site rankings. It is built into Google's ranking algorithms. Other things being equal, a faster site will have a ranking advantage over a slower one.

Pay per click providers like Google also use page speed as a factor while rating the landing page quality. Google recognizes that a faster page has a better chance of conversion. Therefore, a faster page gets a better quality score. Quality score has a direct bearing on your CPC as well. So what you gain by not using a website speed optimization service, you are probably losing in terms of user experience, conversions, rankings and advertising costs.

How Website Speed Optimization Services Work
The techniques of website optimization are complex and what applies to one site may not work with another. Speed optimization services provide a cloud based or a server software based solution that automatically improves website performance without the need for any change in site code. They work well irrespective of the content management system used to create the website as long as the site uses HTML.

Here are some of the commonly used methods. Site optimizers:

1: Simplify large and complex pages and make them easier to load.
2: Optimize the site on the fly to suit the device or browser being used.
3: Predict visitor behavior and load some elements in the background so that they can be rendered quickly if predictable navigation occurs.
4: Make repeat visits faster by caching content on the user's computer.
5: Optimize page code to load essential items quickly.
6: Optimize ads and other third-party content to prevent them from slowing down your site.

The best part of speed optimization services is that they don't require you to change any code on your website. The service sits in between your content management system and your visitor and optimizes pages as they are served.

Website optimization is best left to speed optimization services. Some people may be tempted to optimize their sites themselves, but they are grossly underestimating the technical knowledge and the work involved. To truly speed up websites like the professional service providers, you need a lot of technical knowledge. The code rewriting involved and keeping up with it as your site changes can easily break your site. So instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, it is best to take advantage of services that are available off the shelf.

Contact Website Optimization to learn more about speed optimization for your website.

Website Optimization
3134 SUNNYWOOD DR
ANN ARBOR, MI 48103
Phone: (877) 748-3678
Fax: (734) 661-1331
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/
https://plus.google.com/108123505155721216764/