If you have a website then you know your website's speed can play a critical role on how many people you get to your site. If your website is too slow people will not wait for your website to come up in their browser. You will also find a high bounce-rate in your website analytics. So what is a good website speed and how do you test it? That is what I will cover in this article.
According to DevShed (a large website developer's forum) – a page load time of less than 7 seconds is considered good. Anything longer than that will cause visitors to leave your site! From watching over lots of websites I can tell you a 2 second page load time should be very reachable for anyone. If your website is hosted with a good website hosting company this should not be a problem.
The problem is how can you be sure your website speed is under 7 seconds? You could try to test it yourself and load the page from your own computer. This is a pretty good way to test your website but it's only from your own computer. And what if your Internet connection is slow?
The good news is there are services to test website speed. With these services you just sign up for a free account then they test your website speed from servers located all over the world. The best part is they do this 24 hours per day 7 days per week.
Additionally search engines are now looking at your website's speed. Websites with a slow page load time are not likely to list as highly in the search engines because it can provide a "poor user experience". Before you worry about how fast your website loads you need to now what that number is. Start testing your website and if you have a problem look at these areas:
Does your website use a database server? If so, this could be why your website is slow. Databases can be the weak link for website's speed. Call your website provider and see if they can move your database or find out why it is so slow.
Are web pages static or dynamic? Static Web Pages load faster than dynamic pages when you test website speed because there is less for the web server to do. Plus the good web servers can use something called "caching" to make your website speed faster. At the very least try making your home page a static page- not a dynamic page.
Finally – Does your website do any behind the scenes calls to other websites? If so, the other site may be having problems that are slowing your down.
These are the big factors that play into a having a good website page load time. The bottom line is you need to regularly test your website to be sure you're not losing customers because it's too slow.
