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Mr. Speedy and Ms. Right Now Say My Website is Really Slow!

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The goal of a website is to attract customers, draw them through the pages, and lead them to do business with you. So, the speed of loading is key to your success. Yet, a lot of designers create without keeping this factor in mind. For example, besides music, nothing drives web visitors away faster than a really, really slow web page.

In an age when we can make a cup of coffee in a minute, call Europe instantly, and breeze through a website in seconds, who has the patience to wait while a web page slowly downloads a small section at a time or one image and then another. Really, who has the time?

There are several culprits that cause a slow-loading web site:

Fat Images.  I had a client last year who was unhappy at how long images took to download on their website, especially when their own photo was downloading. Nothing worse than to see half a head for half a minute! The problem was that the original web designer had put high-resolution, print quality images on the website which is overkill. Low res files load so much faster and still look very good on the web.

All Images. In a previous post (“If I Hire an Expensive Web Designer, Will the Quality Be Better?”) we discussed the pitfalls of using a lot of images to create a web page.  Too many images on a page will severely slow the down load. What’s too many? You’re fairly safe with background images , but an image used to display text or for large areas of color, should be strongly reconsidered. If your web designer isn’t using CSS and a “Style Sheet”, they should be!

Invalid Code. The word “code” probably raised your pulse rate due to a fear of not understanding the technical end. You don’t have to read or write code to find out if it’s valid or not.  W3C School has a FREE validator at http://validator.w3.org Simply cut and paste any web page address that ends “.html”  into the field marked “address”. See how easy? One or two errors, no sweat. Ten? Forty? One Hundred and twenty? Time to wonder what’s up.  And this happens all the time!

Slow Server. Every once in a while I’ll see a website that has no code problems, but the site is parked on a very slow shared hosting account.  The most efficient solution is to have the hosting company move the site to another server. If they refuse (don’t know why, but they sometimes do) the site can be moved to another hosting company.

Vanessa Wood of Design to Spec knows how you depend upon your website as a robust slice of your marketing pie. Call us if you want your website to work faster, attract more visitors and be more user friendly for customers. Subscribe to this blog so you won’t miss a single hot marketing tip.


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