Speed is everything when it comes to the web. The speed with which your customers, audience or followers can access your blog, news or e-commerce website makes a big difference with how successful your website is.
User Experience
Speed is pivotal to good customer experience. Users who have a good experience are much more likely to return or make use of your website on a more regular basis.
Ask yourself, which would you really prefer between a fast loading news website and a very slow one? It is certain you are likely to use the faster loading news website more often.
SEO
Google has not made it a secret that they slightly rank faster websites better.
Quoting Yoast SEO:
“Google’s latest research shows that the chance of a bounce increases 32% when the page load time goes from 1s to 3s. 1s to 5s increases the chance to 90% and if your site takes up to 10s to load, the chance of a bounce increases to 123%.”
Quoting a recent post by Google Dev:
“Speed is now a landing page factor for Google Search and Ads: When real users have a slow experience on mobile, they’re much less likely to find what they are looking for or purchase from you in the future. For many sites, this equates to a huge missed opportunity, especially when more than half of the visits are abandoned if a mobile page takes over 3 seconds to load.”
While there are many factors that go into a webpage load speed, the web servers capacity and proximity to the end-user is one of them.
It is necessary to host your website on fast servers that are close to the majority of your audience or marketplace.
Irrespective of where your audience is, you can find reliable virtual servers that are hosted in data centres across Nairobi (Kenya), Accra (Ghana), Lagos (Nigeria) and Johannesburg (South Africa).
In addition to choosing the right hosting for your website, other technical tips for optimizing your website for speed would include:
- Reduce HTTP requests
- Minify and combine files
- Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files
- Delay JavaScript loading
- Minimize time to the first kilobyte
- Regularly run a compression audit
Where these tips are beyond you, you’re welcome to share them with your webmaster or website developer.