| Slow Websites Will Cost You More Money |
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| Monday, 17 March 2008 | |
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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 ReadingWe'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 :)
Comments (7)
  written by Good Web Practices, March 24, 2008
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?
 written by Steve Burge, March 24, 2008
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. written by Good Web Practices, March 24, 2008
OK thanks for that info Steve. Seems like a private server would be overkill for the sites I'm hosting at the moment then...
written by Steve Burge, March 24, 2008
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.  written by eric, April 04, 2008
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?
written by Steve Burge, April 04, 2008
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. Write comment
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Google 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 
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Another article with good resources is one by Alex Rimm-Kaufmann which is on Search Engine Land
http://searchengineland.com/080316-235959.php