Website performance has always been important to users, and slow page load times have never been popular! Who wants to wait around for a page to load when it takes only seconds to hit the back button and move to the next site.
Users make very quick judgements about websites. If they are slow, difficult to navigate, or visually un-engaging, they are quickly disregarded. What’s worse is that a website is often the first point of contact customers have with an organisation. Poor opinion of the website = poor opinion of the business.
The problem got worse…
Earlier this year Google confirmed that a website’s load time is now one of the criteria used to rank the site. Google is now penalising slow websites.
What to do?
Get a developer to assess if the site can be performance optimised.
- Can images be optimised or reduced in size.
- Make sure images are not scaled in HTML!
- Is your hosting provider slow?
- Have you specified image dimensions?
- Are your stylesheets at the top of pages, and javascript below?
- Is CSS & Javascript called from external files.
A more thorough list to speed up your website is available from Yahoo! at developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
Website performance was discussed in an earlier blog article titled “website performance“.
If you are a client of xEcommerce and have questions about the performance of your website, please contact us.
