The Essence of Website Speed Optimization (part 2)

If you familiar with business and online marketing, there is a high chance that you would not encounter problems in generating leads, but if you are far from being an expert, then you might need some serious help. The truth is, even web masters commit a lot of mistakes. And one most neglected areas that need attention is the importance that web optimization plays in the success of any website. In her webinar, Theresa Biacollo of ConversionMax talks about how website optimization can help you gain an edge and we already covered part of in the first part of this article, here.

Modern Online Business

Creating an online business nowadays can be done in a snap of a finger. In fact, even if you lack the finances, there are a lot of service providers that can offer you free online services. Indeed, jump starting an online business and generating profits can now be reachable. However, one downside of this phenomenon is the rising number of webpages. Since everyone is welcome to create their own site, the competition in the virtual domain becomes stiffer and stiffer day by day. As you may already know by now, the tighter the competition, the harder it is to attract traffic and gain profits.

Website Optimization

Trends always change, and vigilant web masters know better than ignore this fact. One crucial factor that you must never overlook when running your own online business is the importance of upgrading your site. However, this is never enough to reach your site’s full potential. Some webpages that have been fully upgraded to generate more profits because web developers tend to ignore this very basic component—speed.

Studies show that speed greatly affects user engagement. Even if you have the best content that’s ready for the world to see, if your pages don’t load quickly, there is a big chance that your audience would close your tab and move on to other links. Remember, in a world where your probable customers have a lot of options, you have to do better than make them wait for your pages to load.

Aside from this, Google Analytics also reveals that speed is also another factor that could help you create a page that is friendlier to search engines. This means that it is not enough that you stick to SEO’s rule book. Rather, you must include speed in your priority list if you want to be on top of that search page.

Optimization Tips

If you are clueless on how to optimize your website, listed below are very simple things that you can to consider for your website:

• Web Host: Looking for a reliable web host is definitely one thing you can do to reach the top. However, the service you’d get would depend on the service you availed. There are times that web hosts are really at fault for the slow loading time of your site, but if you are under a shared web host where the server needs to process data from sites other than yours, then it can make all the difference. This means that you need to study whether or not the service you availed suits your needs, or if the web host is really credible enough to provide you high quality services.
• Competitor Research: Study your top competitor’s page and compare it with yours so that you would be able to get a grip on what you need to do to reach the top.
• Data: The size of your data can greatly impact your page’s loading time. If there’s one thing you must do, it’s to compress what you can compress without losing quality.
• Domain Name: DNS look-ups takes about 20-120 milliseconds, and minimizing this can help your page speed up. This sounds minimal but it adds up when you have several page views per hour.

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Conclusion

Website optimization is far from being rocket science (like you can see at SitePoint’s forum), improving the speed will not make you the virtual billionaire you always wanted to be. It will make a positive impact on your SEO, yes, proven, how much….? Does it matter you visitor will appreciate it a lot and when you reached 3 seconds of load time, you can focus on something else for your ecommerce site. Speed optimize now it is for example more important than A/B testing your website… If you want to learn more about the webinar, you can click here.

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