website speed

Website Speed Matters?

One of things we hate the most as Americans is waiting for something.  So when we encounter a slow website speed, we often do not wait for it regardless of the content.  I don’t think anyone can truly disagree that having a fast responding website is an essential.

Q1. What’s acceptable speed?

All sites created & optimized by WebVillage has goal/standard is to be below 5.0 seconds on initial load. (& under 3 seconds afterwards)  Most well optimized site according to google should load under 2 seconds.  This is provided that you have everything working on your favor.  In the other hand, it is widely accepted that if a site takes over 5 seconds to load, you’re going to start to lose website traffic who abandon while waiting.

pingdom-webvillage

Q2. How to test?

Pingdom is one of awesome tool for page speed testing.  (click on the image above)   Pingdom lets you select different testing location for you to see the difference between west & east coast users or even compare with users in Europe!

pingdom-cnnHow to read?  Simple way of looking at this is the load time.  Lower the better obviously.  But you’ll get different result based on requests and page size.  Sometimes your page size can be only 1.5MB while requests can be as high as 150+ = slowing down the connection.  Sites like CNN has about same size as webvillage.co (3.5 vs 3.8) but it has way more requests than webvillage does. (500 vs. 77)  Each requests are how many connection a browser must request before fully loading the site and 500 is A LOT.  Based on this, CNN can definitely use a diet to make it load faster than it’s current read of 10.02 seconds.

Performance grade is completely separate number where they’ll try to share tips on you how you can improve your site speed.  We won’t get into details on that for now as it’s whole another subject.

Q3. How do I accomplish 1.61s?

It’s actually a lot more simple than you think.  There are three factors that contributes to your speed.  Design, Performance Setup, and Server.

  • Design.  How clean is your codes & plugins?  how many plugins are you using and which of those plugins are requesting connections for each page?
  • Performance.  Cache plugins to make site load faster especially with heavy traffic.
  • Server. Server plays an important role.  A good, faster server = fast website, end of the story.  In fact, a fast server can let you ignore Design & Performance and outperform other sites that has better design and performance setup but hosted at slower server.  This is why we love American Muscle cars.  If it has enough horse power and you don’t need all those other tweaks.

Q4. What about CDN?

CDN is content delivery network and it can definitely help.  But not if you’re site is not busy.  CDN is really for sites that’s getting large traffic from all over the place.  Otherwise, it’s extra work for very little gain.

There you have it.  Basic summary on website speed.  If I forgot anything or have any questions, please let me know via comment and I’d be sure to add more!

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