If you’re in a store and ready to check out but you can’t find someone to help you, chances are you’ll stick around. You may even wait quite a while since you’ve gone through all the trouble of going to a store and selecting which items you want. However, if you’re waiting a long time for a website to respond, you can be on another site making the same selections within seconds.

For this reason, it’s essential that your website runs quickly and loads within mere seconds. People have a large selection of websites that they can get information from or do business with, and you need to be sure that your site is providing what people want very quickly. Additionally, it’s not just sites that sell items that need speedy load times. Sites that generate revenue from ads also need to load quickly to prevent the loss of income.

Importance of Website Performance and Speed 

It is important to understand that today’s customer is always online. This means that if they want to access information online, they will do it through multiple devices. Speed is an integral part of the user experience. This blog details the top reasons why website speed is important and why it is essential to optimize website speed. 

It Can Lower Your Conversion Rate

Studies show that people are steadily becoming less patient when it comes to waiting for web pages to load; 47 percent of people expect a website to load in two seconds or less. For mobile sites, you are given about three seconds before more than half of the visitors say they will leave. Even if you’re getting people to stick around, a slow load time can drop your conversion rate.

A study done by Amazon showed that just a 0.1 second slower load time resulted in a one percent decrease in sales. While Amazon is enormous and your website may not be able to generate that much traffic or sales, it shows that even tiny slowdowns can still have a tangible effect on your business. If slow load speeds are driving people away, then it’s driving your sales away. 

Search Engine Ranking

If you run a business website, you’re probably at least familiar with the concept of search engine optimization, which involves signaling to search engines that people who are searching for particular terms or phrases would benefit from visiting your site. Google, and other search engines, include user experience as a metric when determining where your website will end up in search engine results. 

User experience includes several things, including the quality of content on a site, if it’s easy to navigate and how quickly the website loads. Google doesn’t generally release specific information about how metrics are weighted, but a slow website can dramatically reduce your user experience score. With SEO being so competitive, the last thing you want is a slow website dragging your ranking down. 

User Experience

One of the reasons that user experience is a part of many search engine ranking metrics is because people tend to not return to websites that worked poorly for them. Research done by Statista indicates that almost 80% of shoppers will abandon an online shopping cart if the website is too difficult to use. 

Having a slow website can also make visitors do more than just wait. It can also keep certain parts of your site from working because scripts still need to load. Someone may fill out a form or attempt to add an item to a shopping cart and get an error or find that nothing is happening. 

Additionally, when a website is slow, it may not load properly or things on the page may start adjusting themselves, changing the locations of images and text as people are trying to read or use the site. These types of frustrations can easily send someone away from your site with a commitment to never return. 

The Need for Speed on Mobile

Mobile users can be even more impatient than people on desktops. With the number of individuals using mobile devices to both surf the web and make purchases, you mustn’t be driving away customers and visitors with a slow site. In addition to needing to create mobile and desktop versions of your site, you need to be sure that mobile versions load quickly and aren’t just designed to fit on a smaller screen. 

People on mobile devices often have data caps, and although powerful, smartphones have far less processing power than computers. Images need to be shrunk in terms of both pixels and file sizes, and scripts need to be kept down to the minimum required for the site to function. Along with rating user experience for desktop websites, Google also measures user experience for mobile sites. Furthermore, in the last year, they’ve started ranking mobile-friendly sites higher when people do searches on a mobile device. 

Loss of Ad Revenue

Depending on the ad network that your website is hosting advertising from, you may only get credit for ad views if the ad loads properly if the visitor to the page has the ad show up on their screen, or both. If your website is very slow, ads may not be loading properly, depriving you of revenue. Google found that 25 percent of mobile sites with load times under five seconds had higher ad revenue. 

Resolving Your Speed Problems

Whether you have a slow site or would just like your site to run faster than it already is, one of the first things you should look at is cutting down on scripts and reducing the size of image and media files. Scripts can slow down even a bare-bones site because they use a server’s bandwidth, processing power from the server, and processing power from the computer they are being loaded on. Unless your site – and the page that someone is on – needs a script or function to run, consider ditching it. 

Media files can also dramatically increase the amount of time that it takes for a site to load. Instead of eliminating image files, see if you can’t compress them or use another file type that results in a smaller image. A small loss in image quality can cut an image’s file size in half. 

Another consideration is the server or hosting provider you’re using. You may need more bandwidth or processing power, and if you’re using shared hosting, it may be time to upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated Server solution.
 

Speed matters. It affects your user experience; it affects your search ranking. It affects your sales and conversions. 

Follow Us :
Share :

For many clients just starting out with a website or a new business, a Shared Hosting solution or Virtual Private Server (VPS) is often enough to get off the ground. But, for many there comes a point when these solutions just aren’t enough.

The most obvious sign that it’s time for an upgrade is when your website has started regularly requiring more bandwidth or power than your current plan provides. Sure, this is kind of a no-brainer, but it’s a good idea to upgrade before you start running into trouble. If your site starts topping out the charts, it could temporarily go offline and that’s not good for business. Often we will see clients’ websites explode all of a sudden because they ran a special promotion or got some good press, and we will always work with them to make the transition to a dedicated server as seamless as possible. But, if you start seeing things getting busy, you can avoid a stressful situation with a preventative upgrade.

Another time an upgrade is a good idea is when a web application transitions out of beta or the development stage. While you’re working the bugs out of your application, a VPS can work fine. With just a few developers and beta testers in the system, a dedicated server would probably be overkill anyway. Once you release your application to the public, however, you’ll want to make sure you plan for the inevitable boom in traffic. Nobody wants their newly released project going down right out of the gate!

Regardless of the content of your website, if you’re worried about stability, dedicated servers are always the safest bet. Below you will find a summary of all the benefits a dedicated server provides (and how TurnKey Internet maximizes those benefits for our customers):

• Speed and Performance: Server and network response times in a shared hosting environment depend highly on the activity of others with whom you share space and resources. With a dedicated server you have significantly faster response and page load times because all the systems resources (such as CPU, disk, RAM and network bandwidth) are controlled and utilized solely by the applications on your server.
• Reliability: With a dedicated hosting environment, you have unlimited access to the operating system, server resources and software applications. This gives you a reliable way to manage the needs of your website and database system: it’s all there when you need it. If a neighbor causes a problem by over using resources, it will not impact your website or your business.
• Security: Dedicated servers provide better security than any other form of hosting since you are the only one with the root “administrative” access to your resources (disk, CPU, RAM, etc.) and can configure customized security policies server-wide such as firewall protection, user-level permissions and even restrict the types of applications that run on the server. With other forms of hosting, such as shared hosting, the neighbors you share space with could jeopardize the security of your web and database systems.
• Customization and Flexibility: Dedicated Servers offer unlimited customization and flexibility to meet your hosting application needs. You have access to fine tune and optimize all aspects of the server such as custom versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl/CGI or custom database configurations to suit your application needs, providing substantial performance gains over any other form of hosting. You maintain full root ‘administrator’ access to the server and can install, remove, or modify any applications you wish. If you need even more power behind your hosted application, TurnKey can customize your server with additional RAM, disk and bandwidth to suit your needs or provide you with advanced enterprise level solutions such as clustering, virtualization, load balancing and mirroring of your dedicated server.
• Easy-To-Use-Software: TurnKey Internet offers easy-to-use, pre-installed and pre-configured hosting applications for your web, database and mail system needs. If you know how to use a web browser, you are ready to use a TurnKey Dedicated Server with your choice of control panel, such as cPanel or Plesk. You can even select your choice of Operating System, such as Linux or Windows.
• Multiple Domains: Dedicated servers provide a cost-effective and management-friendly solution to multiple domain hosting. Rather than dealing with the burden of numerous accounts on shared hosting servers, you can host a virtually unlimited number of domains on a single dedicated server. With our server management software, it’s easy to create, manage and delete accounts whenever you want, and all from one interface.
• Worry-Free Operation: TurnKey Internet provides Fully Managed Solutions to ensure you don’t have to worry about your server and can keep your focus on running your business. From offsite backups to managed Firewall and Security monitoring, TurnKey takes care of everything for you.

As you can see, dedicated servers are the best solution for those that are serious about their website or business and want the assurance that hardware, software and resources are dedicated exclusively to them. If you are considering hosting numerous domains, a high traffic site, an e-commerce site, reselling hosting to others, have sensitive data contained in your site or simply want more speed, power and control, it’s time to upgrade to a dedicated server. For more information visit www.turnkeyinternet.net/dedicated-servers

Follow Us :
Share :

Many online business owners make the mistake of overlooking the importance of having a fast website. When you want to get the most from your online presence, the loading speed of your content is one of the most important factors to your success. Your prospects have a lot of distractions fighting for their attention, and you must compete with their friends, family and other advertisers if you want to make any progress.

Web users don’t have much tolerance for slow websites, and most will navigate away if your content takes longer than a few seconds to appear on the screen. So every step that you take to increase your website’s performance will help you attract and retain customers, and you are about to learn how to get moving down the right path.

Content Delivery Network

One of the benefits of working online is that you can reach a worldwide audience, and doing so is one of the best ways to enhance your profitability. But when someone downloads your content or accesses your website, the speed at which the content loads will depend on that person’s location. For example, if your hosting server is located in New York, someone who lives in China will encounter delays when trying to access your website.

If your prospects are forced to wait too long, they will often opt to find a local business that can offer them efficient download speeds. You can overcome that problem by using a content delivery network, or CDN. When you have a CDN, your content is stored on several servers around the world. When someone accesses your website or tries to download a file, the CDN will send the files to them from the server that is closest to that person’s location.

Reduce Image Size

When crafting great content, including valuable and engaging information is not always enough when you need to attract readers and to keep their attention. When you want to keep your audience’s focus, including images is a great way to reach your desired outcome.

But having too many images on your website can impact the loading speed in a negative way, causing you to lose prospects. Although many people try to remove most of the images from their website, doing so is not your only option. You can try converting your images to a web format to reduce their size without harming their quality.

Check Your Scripts

You can find many scripts that will help you captivate and engage your audience, but using too many of them can decrease the loading speed of your website. If you want to speed it up, take a look at each plug-in to determine if you need it and how much it is impacting your site. Disable one script at a time to determine if the changes make a difference in the amount of time that it takes for your content to load. If one of your scripts is causing a lot of harm, consider removing it, but you can also check to see if the developer has released any updates.

Upgrade Your Hosting

If you have tried everything of which you can think to improve your loading speed, then you might want to take a look at your hosting provider. If you have a basic plan, then you might not have access to the amount of bandwidth and resources that you need to improve the speed with which your audience can access your content.

If your hosting plan is the source of the problem, then you might want to upgrade to a better hosting solution, such as a dedicated server, or even a better provider. Although you likely wish to avoid spending more money than needed, the enhanced speed of an effective hosting plan is an investment that will pay for itself over time.

Those who don’t take steps to optimize their website’s loading speed are likely losing more customers than they realize, and you don’t want to repeat the same mistake. Putting in a little effort can go a long way when it comes to keeping your prospects engaged and focused on what you have to say. Optimizing your website is a good place to start when you want to make your content load with enhanced efficiency. But if that step does not help, then upgrading your hosting plan or provider is sure to get the job done.

When your website loads quickly, your customers’ experience will not be interrupted, and they will be that much more likely to make a purchase as a result. The speed with which your content loads is also a reflection of you and your products. When you prevent delays, you are also showing your customers that you care about your reputation, and you will start to earn their respect.

Follow Us :
Share :

We have news, everyone! A new product release! We just introduced our ultra-fast, super-advanced line of TurnKey Internet Virtual Private Servers, and we couldn’t be more excited. Really, this kind of thing makes us all go a little overboard in the zeal and enthusiasm department, but, hey—worse things could happen.

Have you seen those hilarious “It’s Not Complicated” AT&T commercials that have been all over the place recently? Now that DVR is a thing, I generally try to skip commercials—shh, don’t tell—but if I see that one of those commercials is on, it’s likely that I’ll stop fast-forwarding in the interest of a guaranteed laugh. For those of you who haven’t seen these commercials, check out AT&T’s YouTube Channel. There are quite a few of them, and they are all really well-done and funny.

Aside from entertainment value, our High-Speed Stock Trader Desktop VPS release is the reason I’m bringing these commercials to your attention. This one, in particular, really hits the nail on the head.

It really is a no-brainer. It’s not complicated. In the tech world, faster is better, period, and that is why our new High-Speed VPS’s are, simply, a better option.

TurnKey High-SpeedVPS’s take the virtual private server experience to a whole new level. Why? How? Let me rattle off a few reasons for you.

• Our TurnKey High-Speed VPS’s contain solid state drive (SSD) disks, which have crazy-fast input/output speeds; much faster than traditional disks. Traditional disks are rotational, and SSD’s have no moving parts at all. They run solely on flash memory. No movement = faster. You got it? Good.
• At the core of the TurnKey High-Speed VPS is Intel’s® new Xeon MP X7550 2 GHz Octa-Core CPU. This can increase speeds up to four times that of a Quad-Core.
• The TurnKey High-Speed VPS allows for one hundred thousand IOPS (input/output per second) per drive, due to the combination of these SSD disks and the Octa-Core technology. Talk about TEAMWORK.
• The TurnKey High-Speed VPS has the most innovative, highest-performing node configuration on the market There are multiple SSD disks and multiple Octa-Core CPU’s in each (node), configured in RAID-10, using high-performance RAID cards with significant on-board caching capabilities. This is a revolutionary alternative to the other VPS options out there. See? Like your mom’s car, cheetahs, and space ships, virtual private servers are better when they are faster, and it’s not complicated to see why. Check out our High-Speed VPS page. You’ll see what I mean.

Follow Us :
Share :