Website performance optimisation

Table of Contents

Website performance optimisation

 

It’s important for site owners to recognise that page download performance is essential to the success of a site even when many users have broadband connections and sites are hosted to Internet with high bandwidth. Research by Strangeloop (2011) showed that the average user perception of acceptable download time is three seconds, while for the average Fortune 500 site it is seven seconds.

Research by Trilibis (2014) of over 150 prominent mobile responsive sites showed that only 21 per cent of these modern websites were loading in less than four seconds on a smartphone, and that 32 per cent of the sites required between 8 and 48 seconds to load.

Trilibis investigated the reason for this sluggish page-load time of responsive sites and found that image size was the primary cause. By analysing page composition, they determined that the mean home page weight of the sites in the sample was 1.7MB, with a median weight of 1.2MB.

The Strangeloop (2011) research also reveals that these larger sites often have poor per-formance despite use of content distribution networks (CDNs) like Akamai and Cloudflare, indicating underlying technical issues in delivering content from the server.

Google clearly takes this area of website management seriously; it wants users to access relevant content quickly as part of the service and has stated that if a site is particularly slow its ranking will be affected. To help site owners, Google has made available tools such. 

The following guidelines should be borne in mind when registering domain names:

1 Campaign microsites may hinder findability and give maintenance problems.

If a new site is created specifically for a campaign this can cause problems since although Google’s robots will crawl it rapidly, it will probably not rank highly without backlinks from other sites, so it will have poor visibility. For this reason it is often better to redirect visitors typing in the domain name to a campaign subfolder on an existing site.

2 Organisations should register multiple ccTLDs to protect their reputation. As described domaineers’ may seek to purchase domain extensions or ccTLDs which would rightly belong to the brand such as .org.uk or their equivalents in other countries.

3 New startup companies should consider whether the company and domain name can assist in SEO. While existing brands will use their main company or brand name for a site, new companies may benefit if the domain name contains a key phrase that searchers will seek. As we saw about the legal constraints on domain purchase, companies may pay a lot to register a domain such as cruises.com for this reason.

Managers or agencies responsible for websites need to check that domain names are automatically renewed by the hosting company (as most are today). For example, the .com UK domain must be renewed every two years. Companies that don’t manage this process potentially risk losing their domain name since another company could potentially register it if the domain name lapsed.

Selecting a hosting provider

Selecting the right partner to host a website is an important decision since the quality of service provided will directly impact on the quality of service delivered to a company’s customers. The partner that hosts the content will usually be a specialist hosting provider such as Rackspace (www.rackspace.com) for the majority of small and medium sized companies, but for larger companies the web server used to host the content may be inside the company and managed by the company’s IT department.

The quality of service of hosted content is essentially dependent on two factors:

The performance of the website and its availability. As that illustrated in blogger show the relevant performance, so marketers should ask their agency to assess their performance.

The length of time is dependent on a number of factors, some of which cannot be controlled, but primarily depends on the bandwidth of the hosting company’s connection to the Internet and the performance of the web server hardware and content management platform. It also depends on the ‘page weight’ of the site’s pages measured in kilobytes (which is dependent on the number and complexity of images and animations).

Another factor for a company to consider when choosing a hosting provider is whether the server is dedicated to one company or whether content from several companies is located on the same server. A dedicated server is best, but it will attract a premium price.