Website speed is one of the most important things to get right for your website. It not only impacts how your site performs in search engines but also impacts the user experience for visitors to your website. In this episode, we talk about website speed.why it matters and how you can make your site faster.

 

 

 

Resources for this Episode

GT Metrix Speed Analyzer

Google Page Speed Test

Darryl:                    Hey there, welcome to My Bloody Website, the show where we talk all things online, for small and medium business owners or executives who still refer to "their bloody website." I'm Darryl King your cohost ...

Edmund:                And I'm Edmund Pelgen, the other cohost.

Darryl:                    Hi Edmund, how are you today?

Edmund:                Good Darryl, yourself?

Darryl:                    Good. Episode Eight. If we keep this up, we might actually get to ...

Edmund:                A full season, and then NBC will sign us for the second year, and we will be totally on Netflix.

Darryl:                    Yeah, okay ... back to reality. We might just talk about our topic for the day, which is speed and why it matters. Everyone wants to go faster, Edmund; well why should they?

Edmund:                Look man, I'm going to be asking the questions today, because you're the master of speed, right? And when we talk about speed, we're talking about website speed ultimately, right? And I'll preface this by saying Google loves speed, but I'm going to, where it matters for our customers, is website speed. Darryl, tell us your experience about all of the websites that you come across, and your speed experience and why it matters.

Darryl:                    My speed experience? [inaudible 00:01:12]. Okay, why does it matter? Yes, we've talked about, you know, Google likes it, and Google likes it for lots of reasons. But we as people that run websites, business owners, marketing people, salespeople ... we should love speed too, because what it's really about is the performance for the people we're trying to serve, the customers or users of what we do. So if something is slow, if it takes forever to load, if it doesn't work right, there's a really, really, really high correlation with people just giving up and going to a competitor or doing something else. And our lives are all at pace; everything we do these days is at pace. And ...

Edmund:                Is there data to back that up? I mean, is there data to say if my website loads slowly?

Darryl:                    Oh totally. There's a whole lot of statistics about speed performance and how it affects conversions and [inaudible 00:02:05], all of those things. So, speed that we're talking about, is speed to get a response, speed for the webpages to load, speed for any processes and transactions to occur. And, that's all. You know, we're not going to talk about the detail behind it and other sorts of things and what tools might run faster or slower and how you make them run faster, necessarily, but that's what we mean by speed.

                                    And it matters because, it matters to the end user. If they get a poor experience ... Think about it like this: if you stream Netflix or movies through iTunes or whatever it is you do, you know the whole buffering, like "Ah, it's taking forever" ... It breaks up the experience, alright? And then it falls out, and you've got to go back, and you've got to reload it. No one watches a movie if that happens. They give up; they walk away. And that's the same experience.

Edmund:                So how does the average business owner,