Asking your Web site visitors to wait is like asking them to leave. Everyone knows a fast Web site is better than a slow Web site.
Right?
Not always.
The following are eight popular excuses I’ve heard in my time of helping people improve the performance of their Web sites — along with some ideas for fixing them.
- “We don’t have a speed problem” — A lot of people don’t measure their Web site’s performance, don’t know how well it performs from around the world and, therefore, assume it’s OK. Do you know how fast your Web site loads? You can test your load times from around the world using the free WebPagetest, or use WebTuna and see the load times for each visitor to your Web site.
- “But it’s fast on my machine” — It’s fast on my machine, which means it must be fast for everyone else. Right? Most Web site developers and operations staff are on high-speed networks, located close to where their Web site is hosted. But, real world users are located thousands of miles away where the effects of network latency change the way the Web site performs.
- “No one has complained yet” — On the Web, no one complains. If a Web site is slow, people vote with their mouse and just move on. For example, you’re searching for hotels in New York, you Google “New York Hotels” and open the links for the top search results. With thousands of search results, you select the Web sites that load the fastest, and you certainly won’t go through the process of lodging a complaint with the sites that take the longest to load.
- “They must be on a dial-up connection” — OK, someone has complained, and it must be due to their connection speed because, “We don’t have a speed problem,” or “It’s fast on my machine” and “No one else has complained, yet.” Some of your users may be on dial-up connections. But, no matter the connection speed, people judge speeds relative to the other Web sites they use. If they complain about performance, it’s because your Web site is slower than the other Web sites they visit.
- “It’s not our site. If we didn’t have ads, our site would be a lot faster” — There is truth that the banner ads on Web sites incur a large performance hit. An underlying problem is that each extra ad opens one or more new HTTP connections, and there is a performance penalty for each new connection the browser opens (as it resolves the DNS address, opens the connection and requests information). But there are a number of things you can do, including loading them asynchronously or putting fewer ads on a page.
- “People should use Firefox; it’s faster than Internet Explorer” — Although the browser makers each claim their new browser is 40 percent faster than anything else on the market, the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome all load Web pages at roughly the same speed. A Web site’s performance problems will not magically disappear if everyone moves to Firefox or another browser.
- “A new version of the Web site is coming; this will fix everything soon” — A new version of a Web site is a great time to concentrate on performance. However, many businesses find that performance tuning a new Web site gets lost in getting all the exciting new features. If you’re not testing the performance during development, you’ll likely to end up with a new Web site that is even slower than the old Web site.
- “Our customers don’t care about the performance” — People respond well to high-speed Web sites. For example, conversion rates are higher and time spent on Web pages is greater on a faster siite which all contribute to increased revenues. A bad performing Web site is just bad service. You may have customers today who are forced to use your slow Web site to use your business’ services. Will they continue to do so when a competitor offers a better and faster option?
These are the most common excuses we’ve heard from people with slow Web sites. Have we missed anything?
Have you used one of these excuses at least once in the past?
Let us know in the comments section below.
Ed Robinson is the CEO of Aptimize Software, a company dedicated to improving Web performance. Follow them on Twitter @aptimize. Try the Aptimize Website Accelerator for free.
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