Increase your website performance
One of the key aspects of how potential customers assess your business, is the quality of your website. The overall speed and ease of use of your website will go a long way to turning visitors into customers. Websites built for cheap, hosted overseas on bloated WordPress themes may have saved you some money initially. But when no one can access your website without pulling out their hair, you may want to consider how to improve your websites performance.
Google Page Speed insights has been around for many years now, and has been a create tool for web developers to optimize the speed of their websites. Loading times are crucial, you have mere seconds to capture your users attention, before they move on to another site. If your site spends those few seconds loading a blank white screen, you are most likely losing many visitors who come to your site. Many years ago Sites On Fire realized just how important Google was making this, overall page speed is now a ranking factor in Google. So if your website doesn’t meet these guidelines, your ranking will be penalized. So when we developed our CMS, FireStarter we spent a long time, a very long time making sure our code was as lean as possible. Constantly testing out results against Google’s requirements. We are proud to say that our new websites, without us even lifting a finger, generally score 90% and higher.
How do we ensure every website we develop is quick? We’ve employed many different technologies to make sure we meet the 90% and higher requirement to meet Google’s “fast” grading. First is the actual code we run, our entire system is written by Sites On Fire, every line is optimized as much as possible, our database is filled with indexes for faster look ups. Once the code is on the servers, we employ PHP cache so the server doesn’t have to continually work out the same result.
The physical server your website is hosted on is incredibly important. We’ve had clients come to us with existing websites hosted on “cheap” servers, usually this means somewhere overseas. If your client base is overseas that’s fine. But if you run an Australian business, you’ll want your website hosted in Australia. This year we moved to more powerful servers with lightning fast SSD drives, our websites are served over the HTTP 2 protocol which is drastically faster than the older HTTP 1.1.
Images are the lifeblood of your website, good images can make your business look incredibly professional, but this comes at a cost. Those high resolution images we all love, are the biggest payload of any website. To counter this we employ very efficient compression keeping file sizes low, and quality high, plus browser caching as per Google’s recommendations.
Page speed is crucially important, if you’ve got a slow website, please give us a call before it’s too late. We can get your website scoring in the 90-100% range