fixing a slow website

A Slow-Loading Website is Disasterous

Please read this important message about slow websites. Your website speed is crucial for search engine optimization and for a good customer experience. 

Slow website speed is a drag on your customers’ time. User experience is crucial and a perception of the way you do business. These days, we expect web paged to load inside 2 seconds(literally). According to Alexa.com, a website which loads in 4.3 seconds is 88% slower than all websites worldwide. Slow to load = Bad for business. You could lose a potential customer before your home page loads!

Get a website speed test free, CLICK HERE.It takes less than a minute.

Search Engines Penalize Slow-Loading Websites

Website loading speed is a major criteria for search engine optimization. Search engines, especially Google, weigh “user experience” as one of the most important factors in SEO. Slow loading speed is a no-no and your website will fall in the search ranking against faster-loading sites.

How to improve website speed

Website loading speed is critical for a good user experience. This also means it’s critical for good search engine optimization. A better website host costs a little more but what you can make up in new customers far outweighs the cost.

How to Improve Website and Page-Loading Speed

One easy way to solve the problem of slow website speed is to move your site to a better host-a DEDICATED host. A dedicated host means your website is the only site on the server. This will be a little pricey for a typical small business website, BUT, if your website is responsible for converting new customers and real sales, it’s probably worth it. There’s other options-read on.

Most small business websites are hosted on the very cheapest hosting plans such as Godaddy, Host Gator, or Blue Host. These companies provide hosting on “shared” servers. This means dozens of websites and potential 1000’s of web pages, and tens of 1000’s of images, are hosted on a single server. Each of these sites are using and sharing the resources of the server. This causes slow page-loading speed. I’ve noticed this problem is getting worse.

A hosting plan on Host Gator can cost as low as $60.00/year but you’ll likely pay a bigger price in lost opportunities because your website speed will suffer. (What is a new customer worth to you, anyway?)

My best suggestion is to go with a Virtual Managed Server. This is what I’m using for my websites and recommending for my clients. 

I have a big website for my wholesale business, Mazer Wholesale, Inc. We have over 5000 items, plus hundreds of additional pages, images, and videos on that site. When my site was half the size it is now, it began to slow down. Because my site IS huge, and it IS a money-maker for me, I gladly spend the money for a dedicated host. This  host server has massive capacity and so I added a couple of my other smaller websites (formerly hosted on Godaddy) onto the Mazer Wholesale server. What a difference it makes.

High Quality Hosting Is Worth a Few Extra Bucks

Website speed is a major consideration if you want your website to show up high in the search results, especially on Google. Google puts a lot of weight on the user experience and therefore page load speed matters. A good website host will facilitate faster loading speeds.

My hosting provider and I are now providing website hosting on Virtual Managed Servers. This means we are providing website hosting to small to mid-sized websites. These servers have a large capacity but as a managed server, we keep the burden to a minimum so speed is at a maximum and never in jeopardy.

Reduce the Size of Images to Speed Your Website

Images are often a major cause of slow page loading. Photos can be huge in file size, especially those which are uploaded directly from a digital camera. Photos can be reduced in size easily with simple image editing software which is sometimes pre-loaded on computers. I use paint.net. It’s a free download.  If you need help with this, just ask. Images can also be compressed. Reducing file size by compressing them can be done on https://tinypng.com/

For help with any of this, just ask: go to https://smallbusinessu.org/askandrew/

How Website Speed Affects Google Ads

If you’re using Google Ads (formerly known as Adwords), your results could be undermined and your costs increased by slow page loading speeds.

  1. Google penalizes slow-loading websites with lower listing results and higher cost-per-click rates.
  2. Potential customers who click on your ads could easily click away of your website takes too long to load. You’ll pay for that click and you’ll have lost the opportunity to deliver even the slightest bit of information.

Malicious Virus Protection

Managed hosting (with our program) also includes protection against malicious attacks (computer bugs and viruses can make make their way from computers, emails, and websites and into host servers. Nasty stuff!). Our servers are constantly being updated to protect against viruses.

Is your website HTTPS or HTTP?

HTTPS://www.websitename.com indicated a “Secure” website. The details are not important to understand. What IS important to understand is that if you don’t upgrade to HTTPS, your website will soon be dropping down, down, down on the search results. Visitors may even see a warning in their browser or pop-up which says, WARNING-THIS SITE IS NOT SECURE. To avoid this, your website needs an SSL certificate. In the past, this was only necessary for ecommerce websites (websites which sell products and collect credit card information). Now, every website need to be secure.

Not private warning-

Our Virtual Managed Hosting Plan specifically for small business websites can combine an SSL Certificate for a discounted price. This is very important and if you act before your competitors, it could give you a competitive edge. Want more information about this? Just go to www.smallbusinessu.org/askandrew

 

About the Author Andrew Mazer

Andrew Mazer, Founder of Mazer Wholesale, Inc. established since 1986. In 1996, I began marketing my wholesale business online. In 2009, I began helping other business owners market THEIR business online. I am the author of The Business Owner's Guide to Marketing Online, The Groupon Solution, and The One Good Idea Newsletter. Contact me at Andrew@smallbusinessu.org

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