19 Aug

Sites in the Fast Lane

Today, there is no good excuse for having web pages that load at a snail’s pace. Users have increasingly higher expectations, and consider any load time of greater than 3 seconds to be slow.

To get a sense of where you stand today, you can take advantage of some free tools available to monitor site speeds: gtmetrix, site24x7 and edgecast to name a few. But knowing your loading time is only a starting point. There are numerous tricks to increase your speed score such as

compressing, scaling and combining images, and minifying HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Steve Halvorson has written a great article, How to speed up your website load times, that has detailed instructions on juicing up your site.

Probably the simplest way to get your website up to speed is through Google Page Speed, although it’s an invitation-only program. You can also reference this article by Neil Patel for some quick tips.

Website loading speed can be easily forgotten in the more exciting pursuits of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Social Media. Still, slow site loads have an impact on your Google rankings, and more importantly turn away those visitors you are trying to attract…

Photo Credit: Judi Oyama via Compfight cc

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