Monday, August 9, 2010

Website Performance and Page Speeds Are Now Relevant to Google Page Rank

No more slow web pages - no more excuses!!

We all hate web pages that are slow to load but many site owners now believe that we all have high speed broadband connections and that they do not have to design a site for performance. How wrong they are! The network performance speeds can massively vary as most broadband connections are heavy contended. This means the end user experience of a site can still vary from very fast to frustratingly slow.

In addition to this, the average home connection does not have a high tech QOS to ensure that you can do your online banking when little Tommy next door is hammering the line downloading the latest game!

This new consideration launched by Google signals the beginning of interesting times. Network Managers are now going to have to align their work efforts even closer to the site business owners' to achieve the mutual goal of speeding up their website.

Maybe discussions about site design and the overhead of delivering large pages with many objects will be jointly had between IT and the Business? SEO, Sales, Marketing, Development and Infrastructure will all have to work and "compromise" together to achieve performance related objectives.

We are not very forgiving of slow web sites and will typically blame the site that we are visiting for an unsatisfactory experience. Whatever the reason and wherever the fault lies, the end user will leave with a negative perception of the site based on their encounter. It is not your fault but it is your problem!

Ecommerce sites are typically ahead of the curve on site performance as they know that faster sites offer a better user experience and in turn will increase the 'Browse to Buy' ratio thus making more money! With the new Google SEO implications, site performance will become increasingly important. Interestingly enough the ROI time of budget spent on optimising site performance will be further reduced.

So what can we do?

Websites are normally slow due to one of more of the reasons below:

1. The DNS server takes some time to resolve your domain name to your IP.
2. The Application/ web server is slow to create the web pages (maybe dependencies on backend systems such as databases etc).
3. The pages are large and take some time be sent to the client.
4. The code is not efficient for the browser to render.
5. Any part of the connection between the server and client connection is slow.

Remember the network is only as fast as the slowest link! So it does not matter if you have a high speed server network if you users are accessing your site over a contented ADSL. This is the last mile problem!

See Also : PSP Consoles Store. LOWER Prices in The Same Item

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