The speed that a website operates is a critically important part of any marketing strategy. It's a fact that how quickly your site opens for users has a big impact on things like buying decisions. In one study, over 70% of consumers said that the speed of a page had an important effect on whether or not they bought something. Here's some information about understanding what affects your speed and what you can do to improve it.

What Factors Affect Site Speed?

In general, there are two main factors. These include the website speed itself, as well as the web host server speed.

Website Speed

Many factors additionally go into each side of overall speed. For example, website speed is affected by how light your website is and how optimized you've made it for speed. Other factors include what software you're using, how you optimize the code, what kind of compression you're using for images, and other options like browser caching.

There's definitely a tradeoff in using the most flashy design elements possible and making sure that the website is "light" enough to make sure that speed is still high. The key to this is often going with a company that knows how to best optimize your site based on your specific situation.

Web Hosting Server Speed

The other part of what can make your website slow is web hosting. The type of web hosting you choose has an important effect on not only the speed of the site from the perspective of potential users but on how often your site is even available at all.

Going with a web host service that has almost constant uptime, lie around 99.99% is important for that reason. You need to have reliable servers that stay online and that give out your website to visitors quickly and efficiently.

If both parts of website speed are set up properly, then you should have a website speed that is lightning fast and that satisfies anyone who comes by to visit.

Measuring Host Speed

To get a sense of how fast a hosting service is in general, first you need to have access to the service. Fortunately, many companies these days will give you a trial period where you can do this before you start paying.

It's important to make sure that you're getting a trial with a hosting service before signing up if you want to make sure that you can do this without spending extra funds. If you already have a hosting service, and you're worried that it's slow, then you can also check it right now.

There are many tools online that will allow you to do this, including Bitcatcha, for example. You will get a list of response times from different parts of the world in terms of milliseconds. Sites like this one will also evaluate the hosting speed on a grade level with A+ being the highest so if you know that there's room to improve.

In other words, after a test, if the score is poor, then it's possible you could improve the speed from the point of view of your users just by getting a better web host. To get the best sense of speed, you should also add more specifics with some of the tests. Some web host test sites allow you to test how quickly website logins happen, for example, instead of just testing random new viewers.

You can do this to test the experience of veterans to your site who are logging in to buy something. All of this can be highly useful information for evaluation.

It may also tell you whether the problem is on your side, in terms of how you've programmed your page, or on the server-side with your web host, so that you get a better sense of where to put your efforts. Competent web marketing companies will likely be the best option for making this determination for you due to their expertise.

The Critical Importance of Finding the Right Help for Speed

It's difficult to overstate just how important it is to have a fast and responsive website. By some studies, over 77% of adults have a smartphone. Mobile devices often take even longer to load than desktop sites, and they are being used more often.

This means that speed is often even more important than it seems like it at first. If people think that a site is loading too slowly on a desktop, it's often even worse on mobile.

As a result, you will get a huge boost against the competition if you can maximize your speed in every way possible. The difficulty in doing this is that there are so many factors that determine eventual speed. The basic factors are just the start of it.

You need a company like Zimmer Marketing to do the heavy lifting if you want to maximize as much as possible.

They can evaluate your website for its speed and immediately identify areas where you might be able to improve in terms of speed and responsiveness, both when it comes to the desktop as well as mobile users. More and more mobile users are joining the Internet every day, and the subtleties of how their devices interact with your website are becoming more and more important as a result.

You need to have it so that many different kinds of screens of all shapes and sizes can all access your site just as easily and just as fast without any errors.

Getting Started

For more information on how you can get a free site checkup by Zimmer Marketing which will show you ways you can improve your speed, please don't hesitate to go ahead and contact us today. The quicker you contact us, the quicker we can get started improving every aspect of your web design and how your site is presented to users.

It often only takes a few seconds for users to decide whether to keep going with your site after visiting it, and you want to make those seconds count.