Is your website fast enough for your viewers?
Thanks to MaxCDN for being a Silver Sponsor of The 8th Annual JobMob Guest Blogging Contest. Thanks to MaxCDN, JobMob visitors around the world have benefited from faster page loads for years. Please support and recommend them like I do.
Everyone benefits
MaxCDN speeds up your site â worldwide. If your site is hosted in Houston and a user in Hong Kong tries to access it, their browser sends file requests to your hosting company's servers halfway around the globe in Texas, and the files (e.g. CSS, images, Javascript) then need to go all the way back from Houston to Hong Kong. With MaxCDN, your visitor gets those files straight from a local server in Hong Kong, saving a lot of time.
How much time?
3 seconds to say goodbye
You have until the count of three. Thatâs it â just three seconds for your opening web page to load on customersâ screens. Otherwise⊠wave good-bye!
In the age of Wi-Fi and ever-increasing carrier speeds for mobile devices, visitors to your website have developed amazingly short attention spans. It doesnât matter how compelling our content is â if itâs not up and running on their screens in the space of a few seconds, youâve lost them.
A study released by website performance measurement firm Gomez found that the average online viewer expects their browser to render a page in two seconds or less. Whatâs more, if that page hasnât loaded in at least three seconds, up to 40 percent of those who took the survey said they would simply abandon the website.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.
If your websiteâs index page didnât load completely by the second Mississippi, you are walking away from potential sales. Do you conduct e-commerce on your site or generate revenue from programs such as Googleâs AdWords Sites slow to load lose customers and sales. âYeah, itâs probably just one or two here and there,â is what you might be thinking⊠but it all adds up.
And hereâs an example how it adds up⊠that just might get your attention.
Millions in the Blink of an Eye
E-commerce giant Amazon discovered it only took shaving off 100 milliseconds of page load time to escalate their sales by a whopping one whole percentage point. Whopping? Yes, itâs definitely whopping when you put that into further perspective.
Amazonâs second quarter 2013 revenue was $15.7 billion. So, if they added another 100 milliseconds off the time it took pages to load for their customers â about the time it takes to blink your eyes â they might have lost roughly $157 million.
Slow DownâŠand be Rendered Invisible
Running a slow website chases away customersâŠbut it also makes it harder for your customers to find you, too. Google will rank you higher in searches based on how quickly your site loads. If you want to understand how that works, check out this Google blog post.
Todayâs websites push out pages that are nearly twice as large in file size than they were just two years ago, according to Web Performance Today. Those larger file sizes take more time for servers to push out to customers. Your website loads slower, and your search ranking gets lower. Ouch!
Watch Your Speed!
Do you actually know how fast your websiteâs pages load? If you donât know â and would like to find out â head over to Webpagetest and enter your URL.
If youâre not pleased with the score you get, there are three main areas of focus that can help you load faster. Think of them as the âheavy partsâ of your website.
- Images
- CSS
- JavaScript
Each of these three elements can gobble up a whole lot of bytes â drastically increasing the amount of time it takes the pages of your website to load. You donât even have to do complicated things with your site â itâs just the nature of how easy it has become to create rich and sophisticated web environments for viewers. In fact, todayâs websites push out pages that are nearly twice as large in file size as they were just two years ago, according to Web Performance Today.
The Easiest Solution
Fast loading web pages are what you need â but to get that you might think you need to hire a team of experts. Or, you can do what a fast growing number of smart website owners â over 13,000 to date â have discovered to be the most effective and economic solution to supercharging their website.
Engage the services of MaxCDN.
The âCDNâ part of the name stands for Content Delivery Network, which is a network of servers around the world that each maintain the âheavy partsâ of your website we talked about earlier.
Relax and Let Max do the Heavy Lifting
MaxCDN takes your websiteâs images, CSS and JavaScript â and offloads them to data centers around the world. So the big files come from the server thatâs closest to the viewer. Distribution makes your site reliable, scalable â and of course quick to load.
MaxCDN has a global distribution, with 500 peering partners that give you direct reach into over 90 countries. Minus the techno speak, that means if youâre a MaxCDN customer, your viewers are reaching you with just a single network hop. In some cases that means a page load time could decrease from hundreds of milliseconds to only tens.
Five Minutes to Launch!
Plugins make it easy to do yourself. Using WordPress? Just install the MaxCDN-ready the W3 Total Cache plugin, which should only take you about five minutes to accomplish.
Using another CMS? MaxCDN integrates easily with many CMSes such as Joomla, Magento, Prestashop, etc.
Plans and pricing really are affordable â especially if you take advantage of this.
The MaxCDN solution speeds up your website, gets you increased conversion and higher Google rankings â but most importantly, it makes your customers happier because your website is speedier.
And, with 24/7 support itâs easier to set up than it is to remember how to spell Mississippi.
Thanks again to MaxCDN for being a Silver Sponsor of The 8th Annual JobMob Guest Blogging Contest. Please support and recommend them.
With all the great prizes in this contest, I wish I had worked harder to win.
I guess my web site takes a lot longer to load than I thought.
Iâve now read the article twice. I still want to believe the CDN stands for Canadian.
Read.
Interestingly, I have read and commented on this post many times, but I still canât âearnâ the Captain Up badge for the behaviour, but Rocky can. It is all very, very strange.
Interestingly, I have visited this post many times and still canât earn the âCaptain Upâ badge, but Rocky can.