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Mar
17
2008
Slow Websites Will Cost You More Money
Written by Steve Burge   
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Google AdwordsGoogle have just announced that the speed of your site will start directly affecting your profits. If you're using Adwords, fast landing pages will lead to a better Quality Score. Slow sites may well end up paying more for their clicks. More from the Google Adwords blog:

Why are we doing this?

Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don't have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.

?

This is really confirmation of something we've known for a long time. Although theres a server full of information about you in Google headquarters, there's only piece of data about your website that they consider important enough to put in their search results - the size of your website.

Further Reading

We've three introductory articles to help your increase your Joomla site speed: part 1, part 2 and part 3. There's also a great article from Anthony Ferrara called How to Speed Up Joomla. Its well worth subscribing to his blog for his tips on Joomla performance and thought-provoking posts such as "Perfection And Joomla! 1.6" and even "SEO, a mis-guided cause?" ... more about that later this week :)

     

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    Comments  

     
    #1 Anne Hennegar 2008-03-17 22:26
    Good article. I'm a user of Anthony's page cache component and I'm awaiting the production release of Query cache.

    Another article with good resources is one by Alex Rimm-Kaufmann which is on Search Engine Land
    http://searchengineland.com/080316-235959.php
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    #2 David Towers 2008-03-24 03:37
    Steve, do you have your own server? Could you give us a run down of how you went about sourcing it and annual costs please?
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    #3 Steve Burge 2008-03-24 09:13
    Hi David

    We do have a custom server that runs well over 100 sites. We weren't a model of professionalism when it came to sourcing a new server. Our previous host melted down and after 3 to 4 days of so of almost constant downtime we jumped on finding a replacement. I took the advice of someone I respect and moved to Rochen.com. We almost certainly overpay but we've not had more than a tiny glitch in almost a year now. The reliability is worth the price.

    We've sourced other servers for clients since, ranging from $200 per month for a VPS at Godaddy to $600 at Rackspace.
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    #4 David Towers 2008-03-24 09:20
    OK thanks for that info Steve. Seems like a private server would be overkill for the sites I'm hosting at the moment then...
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    #5 Steve Burge 2008-03-24 09:22
    Quite possibly - even with well over 100 sites we're comfortably inside the server's capacity.

    Financially, when we moved we set up a bunch of Adsense sites that pay the hosting bill for the others on the server.
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    #6 eric 2008-04-04 11:22
    After I enabled cache on my Joomla site my page now loads in 1-2 seconds as opposed to 4-5. I know your guide says that pages should load in a second or less, what does Google consider to be a fast loading page?
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    #7 Steve Burge 2008-04-04 11:27
    Hi Eric

    Its hard to give a precise figure as server speed can vary even on the same server and there are lots more variables to go through into the equation.

    Some very popular sites like ESPN.com can get away with being over 100k. However as a general rule of thumb I'd aim for under 40k and even under 30k.
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    #8 jono 2009-04-23 21:30
    After some feedback I discovered our website was loading a lot slower in the US, where most of our sales happen. Before this issue I really had no idea websites could load at different speeds in different countries - sure pays to listen to customer feedback.

    We were lucky because we use a dedicated server so we just put aptimize on it - a small piece of software that goes on the server (so i'm told by my tech guy) - this significantly improved the speed.

    If you have a shared hosting account there's still a lot you can do - takes a bit of tweaking and testing (try using firebug/yslow to identify what's causing the weight on your page load) but focus on the countries where you do the most sales and check out you website speed there - you'll be very surprised. The important point is slow sites cost sales and you might not even be aware that you have a problem.
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    #9 Ronald B 2009-04-25 00:19
    Making easy money is very common these days. The global economic recession teaches us to be aware of the importance of investing and saving money. Increasing taxes and paying bills add up to the economic stress of everyone. In filing for taxes, an easy and accessible way is by using a post office locator. A post office locator can come in handy in a pinch. If you have a package you really need to get in the mail, or if you waited to the last minute to do your taxes on the 15th of April, and haven't joined the 21st century yet and E-Filed (you Luddites, you), take heart. You won't need personal loans to air mail it, because some post offices will be open until midnight on April 15th. It isn't all of them, so you need to find out if it applies to your nearest one. You don't want to need debt consolidation for fines from the IRS because you couldn't use the post office locator.

    personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2009/04/15/post-office-locator-helps-file-taxes-today/
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