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Website Response Time and Small Business Marketing

Guest post by: Karen Scharf

Article Overview: When you create a website as part of your small business marketing campaign, one of the first things that you need to take into consideration is the response time necessary to load and navigate your site.

Website Response Time and Small Business Marketing

When you create a website as part of your small business marketing campaign, one of the first things that you need to take into consideration is the response time necessary to load and navigate your site. This issue was at one time a well-known and popular one, but as the years have gone by and most users now have broadband and high-speed internet connections, many website owners have figured that load time doesn't matter any more. However, even today with our faster computers and light speed connections, slow websites are still an issue. ** What Does Website Load Time Have To Do With Small Business Marketing?

If you have a website that does not respond fast enough, many users will assume the site is "broken" and they will simply click away. Your website can't contribute to your small business marketing plan if your site visitors aren't willing to stick around for it to load in their browsers. The amount of time that web surfers are willing to wait for a site to load has evolved right alongside the speed of internet connections. As our connection speed gets faster, we expect websites to get faster also.

Let's face it, human beings get bored and restless when we have to wait. We quickly lose interest in a website if we have to wait for it to load, and in most cases we decide to go elsewhere. Studies show that many visitors feel like the persons who created the slow loading site are incompetent, since there are "obviously technical problems" causing the site not to respond. (Personally, I can't think of anything worse for your small business marketing than for your prospects to think you're incompetent.)

In fact, lack of speed is one of the number one things that surveyed users complain about when it comes to various websites.

This affects not only how they feel about a website but how they feel about an entire company. Customers expect almost-instantaneous response.

But another important factor that many website owners aren't aware of is that Google now takes website load time into consideration, so a slow website can actually hurt your search engine rankings.

** How Fast is Fast Enough?

Studies have shown that the ideal response time for a website is less than 1 second. Even at 1 full second, users begin to sense a delay and can start to become agitated. Many users actually complain about a noticeable delay in website response when it is just a few seconds. The absolute maximum time frame for maintaining any user attention is around the 10 second mark. A rare number of web surfers are willing to wait 10 seconds for a website to load, but after 10 seconds almost 100% of remaining visitors will leave the site if it has not finished loading. Ten seconds is more than enough time for most users' minds to wander elsewhere and away from your site.

** What Can I Do To Fix Website Load Time?

Years ago, the biggest culprit of sluggish websites was large, poorly formatted images. As more software programs began addressing the issue, and more tools became available to optimize website images, webmasters began paying attention to their image sizes, and web page performance greatly improved. However, we now see more and more entrepreneurs becoming "do it yourself webmasters" using content management systems and wysiwyg web page editors. These entrepreneurs aren't necessarily familiar with the technical requirements of maintaining a website, and so we're starting to see extremely large images that have been uploaded from digital cameras slowing down web pages again.

Another cause of delayed website load time is complex data structures or the over-use of website widgets and plugins. Most content management systems, such as Wordpress and Joomla, are built on a mySQL database - which means the content that is created through the content management system, such as web pages and blog posts, is stored in the database for retrieval when a website visitor loads that particular page. Over time, these databases can get clogged with code that is no longer in use, which slows down the website load time. And since most do-it-yourself webmasters aren't familiar with database management, the website remains slow and sluggish.

Many of these content management systems also offer widgets or plugins. These are extra little "programs" that can be added to a website, such as the ability to show YouTube videos in the webpage sidebar, or the ability to add a calendar of events to a web page. Each of these widgets adds extra code to every web page header, whether the page is using that widget or not.

The only way around this issue is to edit the page code directly - a task that most do-it-yourselfers aren't familiar with.

If you want to keep users interested in your site it is important to keep widgets simple and to a minimum. Yes you want them to follow you on Twitter, but you are never going to get that far if it takes 8 seconds to load the webpage with the Twitter widget. Make sure your site is streamlined and concise. Keep all widgets, scripts, and data as simple as possible and time your website response yourself. Try it out on various computers and connections. You want to aim for your response time to be less than a second on even a mundane broadband connection. This will appeal to visitors far more than anything else you can offer, which will, in turn, improve your overall small business marketing efforts.

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Article Tags: response time, web page load time, website design



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