A client of ours recently came to me after building his own website. He’d used a budget hosting provider, but he was having issues with his website load times – sometimes taking over a minute to load each page! The average attention span of a visitor to your website is just 7 seconds. In fact, 17% of all page views last less than 4 seconds – so if your website is taking an age to load, it may be time to consider upgrading your server.
Now, this client had built his own website and he’d used a lot of plugins. He was happy with the overall look and feel of the website, so we’ve optimised it as best as possible for him. By moving it from his budget hosting to a VPS (Virtual Private Server), the load times instantly came down to an average of 8 seconds. A bit more background work on the server, and that was down to just 6 seconds – a tenth of the original load time.
Next, we performed a few optimisations on the site itself. We’re already down to an average of 3-4 seconds load time, which is finally an acceptable load time – especially for how many plugins are still installed!
The speed of your website will also have an effect on your Search Engine rankings – the faster a site is to load, the better it is for your SEO. (Search Engine Optimisation)
You can even check for yourself using Pingdom’s handy tool – ideally, anything under 4 seconds is good, and 2 seconds is great!
So if your website seems to be taking a while to load, why not get in touch? Whether it’s time to take your website server to the next level, or even just get a few optimisations on your current hosting, we’re here to help. Give us a call on 01543 675474 and let’s get your website up to speed!