Is website speed critical to your business?
Consider: A study has shown that increasing response times by 500ms for Google reduced traffic by 20%. Response time increases of 100ms on Amazon decreased sales by 1%1! These are some pretty amazing figures.
The reason is probably that we were made to live in a physical world. And so there is certain responsiveness that we expect from physical objects that we then translate into the digital world. Simply put, speed affects user experience.
Noted usability expert Jakob Nielsen has said that to create the illusion of direct manipulation, a user interface has to respond in 0.1 second. That is, any slower than that and a user is going to feel like the “computer is doing something” versus that they themselves are taking the action. Additionally, for a user to feel like they are navigating freely, they need to experience 1-second response times.
So, the answer is yes. Website speed is critical.
It’s not easy to get things that speedy, especially because some of the new styles of coding, which provide a lot of nice interactivity right within your browser (think Google Maps), also make for heavier pages.
Here are a few things you can do to get yourself on the pathway to speedier sites:
- Install the Firefox Firebug plug-in and Google Pagespeed or YSlow! tools so you can see what’s going on.
- Optimize the front-end rendering time by implementing technical improvements like minifying your JavaScript, optimizing your CSS selectors and splitting your resources across multiple subdomain names.
- Implement a Content Delivery Network so that visitors “see” your site content from servers that are nearer to them geographically.
- Move off of $10.95 hosting. Sorry, but those guys put 700+ domains on a single computer that may be about as powerful as your desktop PC.
Speed is possible, but it does take some work and attention to detail. Want to go for speed? Get in touch with us.
1http://www.slideshare.net/stubbornella/designing-fast-websites-presentation
