The very nature of the two terms ‘want’ and ‘need’ make very clear that there’s a big difference between the 2 of them. The majority of the time we will want something, but it’s hard to rationalize saying that we truly need it.
There are exceptions to this of course, and considering we’re going to be talking about speed here this week we’ll go with an automotive analogy. Many car enthusiasts – and guys in particular – would like to have a sports car with a powerful V8 engine under the hood and performance suspension tuning, but in reality their Toyota Corolla suffices for their day-to-day driving habits. Take a highway patrol officer, however, and having a vehicle that’s got plenty of acceleration and top-end speed at its disposal is every bit a necessity.
Nearly every Canadian web hosting provider is going to make a point of offering speedy web hosting servers available to their customers these days, and fact is that’s a reflection of a demand based much more in need than it is in want.
If your website serves as the primary contact point for e-commerce aims, then slow-loading websites and ones that are sluggish to respond may well be taking a big chunk out of your sales and revenue. Sales and conversions come from the combination of effective content with faster loading speed of your website, and you had better believe that prospective customers are as impatient as ever.
For years now, surveys have showed that loading speed of websites has a great impact on their traffic trends. So how is yours measuring up, and is it being hindered by slow servers?
Revenues taking a hit?
‘Bounce rates’ are a statistical reflection of visitors who choose to leave your site prematurely. A number of studies have proven that the average visitors will leave your website if it does not become accessible in 3 to 6 seconds. We could go into detail here, but really there’s no need – once they’ve bounced, they’re likely not coming back, much less making a purchase of any sort.
Here’s a relevant example. Shopzilla generated 12% more revenue by simply improving their website speed from 6 seconds to 1.2 seconds. That’s a significant jump, and shows that even a matter of seconds in website response time can make a big difference.
Similarly, other findings over the last few years seem to indicate that you can improve your conversion rate by up to 2% for every second you up your website speed. Of course, that will vary and be dependent based on the nature of your business and type of products, services – but the appeal of that statistic should be very genuine and something you want to keep in mind.
Ballpark Figures for ‘Fast Enough’
The ideal loading time of a website is under 3 seconds. If your website becomes visible in 5 seconds, you’re doing well. If it is under 10 seconds, it’s acceptable – at best. If your website exceeds 10 seconds, however, there’s no debating it’s going to be detrimental for you.
There are several performance metric tools available to report the performance of your website speed along with web page improvement suggestions. You can optimize the structure of your code to get faster responses, but for starters you need to be with a web host that has servers which pack the vroom-vroom you need.
Server speed may be an issue if your website is located on one of the more inexpensive shared hosting packages. The architecture of your web pages and the presence of more dynamic multimedia content (video etc) can be big factors in the need for more speed from servers. If you have a business website, mobile application or a professional service website, VPS (virtual private server) hosting is one option to get you the speed you need.
Dedicated servers also offer the benefit of:
- Loading faster
- Being able to handle traffic spikes
- Offering better security
So we’ll conclude this week, by stating emphatically that here at 4GoodHosting we know that search engines out there incorporate page load timing in their search ranking factors and they, in part, give you back ranking points, traffic and sales. Our servers and solid-state drives are as fast as you’ll find – period – and we’re constantly testing them to make sure they stay that way.
