Speed matters

With ever increasing broadband speeds you would think optimising the speed at which a website loads is becoming less and less important - but you couldn't be further from the truth.

Even as the speed at which we connect to the internet improves - so too does the complexity of the media which we are viewing. Individual web pages have more lines of code, bigger images, extra scripts to add some of the nice features we are seeing such as animation etc and all of this makes them "heavier". Visitors are also becoming accustomed to web pages loading fast and more and more we see people clicking their "back" button if a site is too slow.

Search engine giant Google announced a while back that they will start to include the speed of a page load into their algorithm for deciding which site to show in search so it is also going to impact SEO for websites. And finally we have an ever growing range of mobile and tablet devices connecting to the internet, often on reduced internet speeds who still want fast loading websites.

What is our answer

We do several things to ensure our websites are fast. We start from the ground up.

Firstly - even the lowliest website we host is placed on a server capable of quick response times. Especially on dynamic or CMS driven websites the server has to do some processing to create the pages we are requesting so making sure they can do so quickly is essential.

We then look at the design. Where possible we reduce the use of images by using CSS to achieve the effects we want. Where we do have to use images we optimise them in Photoshop first to squeeze the file size down as low as possible while still having a great image.

When it comes to the code driving the website we then do a variety of things to ensure quick loads. We use software to compress all the code for the site - the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and anything else that is included. We aggregate each of these types of files into one so the web server is serving as few files as possible as this is a common source of drag.

Finally, if pages are being generated dynamically by the CMS we make use of "caching". That is the server generates the page, saves it as a simple HTML file which can be served again and again without having to re-generate it. We then let it update every few hours to make sure new content is coming forward.

What this means for our clients

Why are we doing all this?

Simply put, we want our clients to succeed - if their website loads slowly this affect their business and this is unacceptable to us. We can't guarantee business for our clients, but we can do everything in our power to make sure they are in a position to succeed.

What do you think?

We would be interested in finding out your experiences with slow websites, how long do you wait if a page is being slow? What about mobile users, what kind of experience do you have (we have also now started building our new sites to be optimised for display in mobile browsers - more on that later).

Leave your comments below.