Have you given much thought to your website speed?

For many people, you probably don’t really consider it until there is an issue. If you’re browsing online, it can be frustrating when a website doesn’t load as it should, or when it is too slow to load.

Website speed really matters, especially if you’re running a business where you rely on people completing transactions via the site. A slow website can lead to people giving up, meaning your website doesn’t do the job it was supposed to.

Let’s take a closer look at why website speed is important and what factors affect it:

Why website speed is important

First of all, let’s throw in a couple of quick definitions for page and site speed, as the two are often confused:

• Page speed = the measurement of how fast the content loads on an individual page
• Site speed = the average page load time for a sampling of page views on your website.

Both the speed of individual pages and the average site speed are important considerations for your website. One primary reason is bounce rate. This is defined as the percentage of website visitors who navigate away from a website after viewing just one page. Obviously, your preference would be to have people continue to browse and to stay on your website as long as possible!

Pingdom conducted some tests to see how page load time impacts bounce rates. As you might expect, the longer the load time the higher the bounce rate. Importantly, look at the bounce rates for load speeds of up to five seconds (most websites can manage this), you can see that the more you’re able to keep load time below five seconds, the better.

Source

If you sell products or services via your website, higher load speeds amount to bad news for your sales. They’re a quick deterrent to visitors exploring any further. Conventional wisdom has suggested for the last few years that page speeds should be less than two or three seconds; however interestingly over that time, Pingdom notes that average website size has steadily increased. This is one factor that can slow down your load speed.

Site speed and SEO

A second key factor for why website speed matters is because it is an SEO ranking factor for your website, and has been since at least 2010. What does this mean? Google says that site speed forms one of the signals used by its algorithm to determine how pages are ranked in search results.

Your website can be doubly penalized in search results if you have slow load speeds. There’s the use of speed itself as a ranking factor, but then there are other ranking factors that may be affected by speed, such as your site bounce rate. Google’s aim is to show the best-quality results to searchers – if they quickly leave a page, it is indicating to Google that the result wasn’t great.

Another potentially negative impact of slow speed on your site search results is the time allotted by search engines to crawl your website. This is the process by which the search engine inspects the pages of your site and creates an index of them. Obviously, you’d like all important pages to be crawled and indexed, but slow speed means that fewer pages can be crawled.

The bottom line? You need your average site speed as well as individual page speeds to be as quick as possible.

Site speed is an SEO ranking factor - don’t let your site get slowed down! Click To Tweet

What impacts website speed?

Multiple factors impact your website speed. The good news is that most of the time, there is something you can do about it if one or more of these factors are slowing your site speed.

Scripts and plugins

Plugins and scripts help you to add functionality or design factors to your website. They give you features such as advertising, pop-ups or needed background functions. Some of these features will be absolute must-haves for you, but scripts and plugins can also be behind slow website speeds.

For example, if you have a lot of plugins or scripts operating on your website at once, these will slow it down. Sometimes the overall quality of those plugins or scripts might not be up to par either. A poorly coded plugin can be a major weight on website speed.

We always recommend that you take a minimalist approach to scripts and plugins. This means only installing those that are absolutely necessary to operate your website as needed. It’s a good idea to make a list of what those functions and associated plugins are. If you suspect that plugins or scripts are slowing down your website, there are a couple of things you can do to fix it.

Firstly, if you have the skills you can test this for yourself. The process would be to test your website speed using a tool, such as Pingdom, then retest after uninstalling each plugin that isn’t absolutely necessary. If you find that there is a necessary plugin causing issues, you might need to look for a better alternative.

Secondly, you can hire an expert to sort out your website speed, especially if issues with coding or how to install or remove plugins aren’t your fort?. Someone who deals with these things every day will have a good idea of where to look first.

Site coding

Besides plugins or scripts, it’s possible that the coding of your website is not up to a good standard. Sometimes you may find that the coding behind your website is overly bulky or cumbersome, slowing the whole thing down.

This can occur when an inexperienced developer works on your site, or when features, such as your theme, use bloated coding. What can you do about it? You may again want to get an expert to look over your website and tidy up any poor coding. Otherwise, potentially you may need to choose a new theme or eliminate some features.

Images or multimedia

The size of images or any multimedia you use can impede the load speed of your website. The bigger the file size, the slower your page load speeds.

It is best practice to compress images before uploading them to a website. Use JPG for most photos, or PNG for low-detail images, such as logos. As for any multimedia, if you can have that uploaded somewhere else, then embedded into your website, that will help to speed it up. For example, by uploading to YouTube then using the embed code on your site.

Use of browser caching

In this case, if you are not using browser caching it can slow your website speed down. Caching is the process of storing files locally so that they are retrieved faster in the future. This is used for content that is the least modified, such as images and external scripts.

Caching can be implemented with a plugin – there are a few good options if you’re running a WordPress website, for example.

Your choice of web hosting

The web hosting you choose for your website plays a big role in how well it performs. Do you know what you’re getting from your web host? Sometimes the cheap hosting deal isn’t a great value after all, especially if it means performance issues.

Some hosting options put you on servers with too many other websites, causing slow speeds when the load on those servers becomes too much. Sometimes you might find that the server technology itself is poor. Older servers might lead to site speed issues, too.

Another thing to look out for is any bandwidth limits that your host imposes. Your site could end up throttled if it meets limits, impacting user experience.

Content delivery network

This is another one where not using it can result in slower website speeds. A content delivery network (CDN) has data centers worldwide in order to store your website data locally.

What does this mean? Let’s say your site is hosted on a server here in St. Louis – if a customer in Europe were to browse your site, they’d ordinarily find it slower than someone browsing in the US. A CDN will store information closer to their location, so that it loads more quickly.

Final thoughts

Your website speed matters. A slow speed can turn visitors away, meaning you don’t achieve the goals that you’d like from the site. It can also impact your SEO. Site speed is a known ranking factor in search results.

Fortunately, if your website is slow, it doesn’t have to be fatal. There are some common issues that can contribute to slow load speeds which can be fixed.

Get your free website report from us here to learn how your site could be more profitable

You may have seen our NVMe product on our website and wondered what the big deal is.

What does “insanely fast” mean for you? How does it work and why is it better than regular SSD technology?

As a brief primer, NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is a relatively recent technology protocol. It accesses high-speed storage media and has several advantages as compared to legacy protocols such as SATA.

The earlier SSDs that utilized SATA aimed to minimize any changes in the legacy HDD (Hard Disk Drive) enterprise storage systems. The limitation is that SATA was not designed for high-speed storage media. By contrast, NVMe utilizes parallel, low-latency data paths to media, offering higher performance and lower latencies. (Latency is the term we use to refer to the delay between requesting and receiving information).

What does this mean when you’re making a decision between choosing between NVMe and other technologies? Here are some clear advantages:

#1. It’s geared for enterprise workloads

Many enterprise-level companies are data-heavy, requiring some serious heavy lifting from their computing solutions. For example, look at any company that might require a large data analytics load to be operating at any second. Or, consider a busy online trading platform, where thousands of requests per minute may need to be processed.

Any enterprise that is sensitive to data latency is a good candidate for NVMe technology. How does it achieve better speeds? It uses parallel, low-latency data paths within the back-end of flash arrays.

To give a specific example, legacy SCSI is a serial protocol, meaning that it can only talk to one disk device at a time. NVMe allows you to have up to 64,000 simultaneous requests and access storage capacity much more efficiently. The NVMe drives provide significantly more IOPS – Input – Output per second. What this means is the you can write more data per second to the hard drive and you can read more data per second.

In terms of cost, NVMe consumes a lot less power than other solutions and reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprises less as well.

Source

NVMe is a top choice to cater to enterprise workloads Click To Tweet

#2. Better website user experience

Higher IOPS means better performance in the eyes of your website users. As you will know, user experience can make or break the success of a website. Our website visitors expect to be able to do what they need to within seconds and that the website renders well for them.

Imagine a lot of people arriving on a website at once. For example, if you run tax services and it is tax season, or if you have a popular ecommerce store and it is Cyber Monday. Legacy technologies can lead to significant performance issues when there are multiple site requests simultaneously.

Some websites operating on older technology will outright crash with heavy use, while others will slow down so significantly that users lose patience with them. Overall, not only is this a poor experience for the user, it can be costly to your business. The chances are people will leave if they can’t achieve what they need to quickly. NVMe provides more outputs per second, meaning your website renders faster in the browser of the user.

Consider the types of websites where data needs to be saved or uploaded too. If a user is hitting a “submit” button, NVMe allows this to happen much faster and assures them that their data has been received. This is because there are more inputs per second writing to the hard drive.

From the perspective of website users within the company as well, NVMe can provide a superior experience. Consider for example companies with large databases that want to pull a lot of information from the hard drive at any one time. Sometimes a “show all” command involves thousands, even millions of rows of data in a database. With legacy SSD technology, this will usually involve several minutes of waiting around, whereas NVMe cuts that wait time right down.

To give a specific example, we have some clients that use Quickbooks on their NVMe servers. They like them because they can pull up all of their customers much more quickly. They also report that generating invoices is a much quicker process than it used to be under older technology.

#3. Better bottom-line business benefits

We can infer from better customer experience and faster performance for the business that there will be better bottom-line benefits too. In fact, there is some data to suggest this is so.

To backtrack slightly, a lot comes down to customer expectation of performance. While internet speed and device performance have improved, they’ve also lead to increased expectations around website speed. Data shows though that websites have become more technology-heavy and have slowed down overall, especially when we look at large ecommerce sites and other traffic-heavy websites.

Research shows that 57% of website visitors will leave if the website doesn’t load after three seconds. 80% of those people will never return. Of that 80%, half are likely to tell other people of their bad experience. This means that not only is a slower website impacting the number of conversions you get, it’s affecting your overall reputation. Would a speed boost from NVMe be worth it from this perspective? We think so. You could potentially expect more revenues, more commissions and better overall customer service.

Even if your website is mostly used for internal purposes, you can get better benefits for your bottom-line. Consider the workload of team members and how it may be impacted by website speed. Are they waiting around for thousands of lines of data? Or, does the data arrive quickly allowing them to get through their work speedily.

Better business efficiency allows for more focus on activities that drive your bottom-line. We’d say that’s a great reason to opt for NVMe over other choices.

#4. NVMe has unique features

There are several features that are unique to NVMe and very helpful to businesses – we’ll mention just a couple here. One of those is that no custom device driver is required. Early SSD versions would often require the deployment of a completely new device driver to access the SSD any time a user upgraded their operating systems, or even made a simple security patch.

NVMe is supported as-is by all major modern operating systems. The standardized interface supports any NVMe from any manufacturer.

Another feature is that NVMe can increase device lifetime. With older SSD technology, SSDs have a finite lifetime dictated by the number of write operations known as program/erase (P/E) cycles NAND flash can endure. NVMe uses multi-stream writes which reduces device management writes to improve device lifetime.

#5. NVMe is the technological future

Consider this extract from a Network World article:

“As NVMe technology matures, costs decline, and storage performance requirements rise, enterprises will move toward flash-based storage systems that implement NVMe end-to-end and can support mixed workloads. “There’s a TCO argument around a system for mixed workloads that’s built out of NVMe instead of SCSI. It still has flash, but it’s flash that you talk to over NVMe versus flash that you talk to over SCSI. You can build a more powerful system in a smaller footprint that uses less energy with the NVMe-based version,” Bergener says.”

The overall implication is that NVMe will eventually replace other storage options anyway. More and more enterprises are shifting to NVMe already, although it hasn’t yet reached the 50% threshold.

If you’re looking for new solutions anyway, you could look at NVMe as a future-proofing investment. If you want to be able to scale easily and require higher infrastructure density, then NVMe will deliver you the best possible performance. Importantly, NVMe is upgradable for newer storage technologies so you can be certain you’ve made a good choice for the long-term.

Final thoughts

NVMe is next-level when you’re looking for superior and reliable website performance. Speed matters, and NVMe is what we’d describe as “insanely fast.”

If you’re making choices about your website infrastructure, we’d put NVMe near the top of the list as a solution. It has longevity, performance and a range of features that push it ahead of other solutions.
To learn more about our NVMe hosting solution, click here.

Many of our clients see the appeal of a hands-off website.

You’ve got a lot of other activities to get through in the running of your business, and you don’t want your website to be another task on the pile. There are many different maintenance requirements that go into a website, and you don’t want to do any of them yourself.

This makes a lot of sense – a fully-managed website allows you to get on with the business of doing business. However, there are some important things you’ll need to manage to make sure your website is a success.

Having a fancy website won’t automatically mean that people turn up. You have to be savvy about marketing and messaging, which are things that your website hosting company do not usually do for you.

Here are some things to consider for your website:

Your messaging

Did you know it takes about 50 milliseconds for visitors to your website to form an opinion of it? Within that flash of time, they want to be able to grasp what your site is about and whether your business might be of interest to them.

Messaging is something that you need to come up with for your business unless you’re also planning on hiring a separate marketing firm to take care of it (even then, they need to know what you’re trying to achieve in order to formulate the right messages!).

A common mistake that businesses make on their websites is trying to have a catchy slogan or interesting design, but not sending a clear message. Website visitors need to know what you do and who you do it for very quickly; otherwise, they may give up and leave.

Great homepage messaging considers the target audience and includes a value proposition for them. This means that you communicate with visitors how what you do or what you sell can make a positive impact on their lives.

You will need to work with your web host to ensure that your website displays the clear messaging that you want to communicate. It’s a good idea to define who your target audience is first, then come up with a few ways to communicate with them. Take a look at websites that do this successfully – for example, in the screenshot below, Evernote does a great job of stating exactly what they do succinctly and immediately.

Make sure your website messaging is clear to visitors Click To Tweet

Your content

Besides the messaging for your website, you need to look deeper at the rest of the content you will provide. Most web hosts will manage the website and put up content for you, but they won’t create the content themselves. You will need to either produce it yourself or hire a content strategist to do it for you.

Why does content matter so much? For starters, it can help to show your company in a good light. Your content can demonstrate your expertise and (should) deliver value for your target audience. When people gain something of value, they also start to trust your business and consider using your services.

Secondly, website content helps with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your website. Basically, the better-optimized your website is, the better it does in terms of search engine ranking. This means that when people type in a search term that is related to your business in Google, your website features somewhere in the results. It takes time to rank highly in results, but having good quality, relevant content helps.

What is “quality content?”

What exactly does “good quality” and “relevant” mean? Your content should answer to the needs of your target audience and be relevant to your business. For example, there would be no point in producing content on an irrelevant topic just because that topic is popular. If your website is for an accountancy service and you’re trying to game the system by putting up “funny cat pictures” it can come back to bite you in the form of being penalized by Google.

Google and the other search engines aim to deliver a quality experience to their users. This means that they want to display the most relevant results first. If you are an accountancy service, something like “how to prepare your small business for tax season” would be much more relevant, and needed by your clients. It’s much better for your business to attract qualified traffic too!

Of course, you can also look at the overall quality of the written content. The best content is technically well-written and delivers an actionable or thought-provoking message, without resorting to writing fluff. Consistency is also important, in terms of tone, quality and frequency, especially if you are producing a blog.

Many business owners look at this and say, “but I don’t have time, I want a hands-off website without having to commit to the content.” If this is you, then it is possible to outsource your content, but you’ll still want to ensure that your messaging and business goals are at the heart of it. You can then get your content person to work directly with your fully-managed web host.

Your marketing

“Build it and they will come” is not a theory that usually works with websites! You still need to work on the marketing side to make sure you get traffic and make your website a success.

A managed website does not include the marketing of that website. This is something that you will need to manage to make your website worthwhile. If you are a bricks-and-mortar operation, then that probably involves online and offline advertising methods.

Here are some examples:

Online marketing

• Build an email list and regularly send out a newsletter or updates.
• Setup pages on social media – be active with posting and engaging.
• Consider paid advertising online. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon or Google advertising.
• Claim your business listing on local directory sites (such as Yelp and Yellow Pages).
• Use content marketing – create blog posts, guest post on other websites or syndicate content.
• Join your local Chamber of Commerce to be featured in their local directory.

Offline marketing

• Include your website on business cards and brochures.
• Sponsor local events.
• Take out paid advertising in newspapers or magazines.
• Send out direct mail campaigns.
  

Testing your website

How do you know which messaging or website layout gets the best results? How do you know overall whether your website is a success?

You can clearly define your target audience, make website layout and feature decisions, and ensure that your messaging and marketing activities seem to be a good fit, but you won’t really know unless you test out different elements of your website.

A/B testing is the most basic form of testing a website. It involves pitting one version (A) against another version (B) and checking if one does significantly better than the other. For example, you might test out headlines, calls to action, web copy, sign-up forms, your checkout flow, layout… there are a huge number of things you can test, so it’s a matter of focusing on what you think might get you the best uplift.

This doesn’t sound very “hands-off” does it? Fortunately, A/B testing is another thing you can outsource. Why would you bother with it? Because optimizing your website can make a huge difference to the results you get. For example, you might find that people weren’t checking out as often due to a long or difficult checkout flow. Testing a different flow may bring better results.

If you do decide to outsource A/B testing, one thing you will need to contribute is your goals for the site. This helps to focus the testing on the areas most likely to impact those goals. You can then work with your web hosting company to make any changes.

Final thoughts

A hands-off website is the ideal situation for many businesses, but it’s important that you still partake in some activities that help your website to be more successful.

When you’re having your site fully managed, you can expect a website that operates well, is designed attractively and has requested changes made by your host. You will still need to get the tasks done that help to draw traffic to your website.

Some of these may be outsourced too, but it’s worth thinking about so that you make the most of your website investment. How will you achieve your desired website goals?