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The Importance of Web Page Load Times

Does your site take more than 4 seconds to load?

Well Google Penalises slow pages and ranks them lower, also users or potential buyers are less likely to view your website if the page takes too long to load.

You might want to consider implementing some of the following to speed it up:

  1. Check your hosting package – if you pay only a small amount for hosting per year the chances are you are on a shared server package – there could be thousands of sites on the same server that could be affecting your performance as you share resources, other options are VPS server (which we can offer here) or find a good host with no overcrowded servers. Our Shared Hosting we keep our Contention Ratio low, so you don’t have to share to many resources, keeping your speeds fast.

2. Make sure your images are the correct size for the area they are placed in, e.g., don’t use a 2000px x 1000px and then use style to shrink it down to 200 x 100px – large images slow your site down so reduce image sizes by changing resolution (72dpi), compressing the picture and cropping out any unnecessary bits

If you don’t have photoshop try using this free tool.

  1. If you have a WordPress site be sparing with your plug ins! – go back and check whether you actually use those plug ins or whether there is better improved plug ins. You can also run 2 other good plug-ins to minimise footprint. WP Smush – Which will optimise your images to be a smaller size without the loss of quality.
    WP Supercache – Will store a small, cached version of your website, allowing load times to decrease as less content has to be redownloaded by the user.
  2. After implementing some of these factors, it’s time to test the new changes and find what else you can change. Use this great website GT Metrix, which provides a great insight to what changes you can make to improve site performance.