Speed Optimisation

Even though broadband technology has advanced in leaps and bounds, the speed of a website is still something we need to keep at the forefront of our minds.

There are a number of different factors that determine how fast a web page loads on any visitor’s screen, not least of which is how fast their broadband connection is – this is particularly true of mobile devices as cellular data connections tend to be slower, so good websites are built to accommodate those speed restrictions by having fast-loading content.

That said, what we don’t want to do is compromise the design and contents of a website, so there’s a careful balance to be made when optimising for speed – sometimes we’ll even create totally different content that’s only delivered to mobile devices.

There are good reasons to speed up a site.  The obvious one is that Internet audiences are naturally impatient and many potential customers won’t sit and wait for content on a slow site to load, they’ll either skip the content altogether or worse, abandon the site and move on elsewhere – if that’s not a scary enough prospect, then keep in mind that modern search engines also use the speed of websites as one of the factors to determine where the site appears in search results.  Slower sites move further down the list allowing faster competitors to rank higher and be more likely to be seen by an audience.

As well as the audience’s broadband speed and site content size (usually measured in megabytes), there are things we can do to control and improve the speed of your site.  Techniques that can radically change a site’s speed.  Techniques like cacheing save copies of the elements on pages, whole pages or even the whole site anywhere between the client’s machine and the web hosting server that the site sites on.

Further techniques to maximise the speed of the web hosting server can also produce significant results.  But the choice of which techniques to use and how to best suit them to an audience is something that most people need guidance with, and that’s where another element of Urban Haze’s experience and expertise comes into play!