The best website is a fast website. Your visitors decide within 6 to 8 seconds if they want to stay on your website. On a slow website, visitors click away faster. That costs your company potential turnover.
The faster your website is, the more pleasant it is for your visitors. The longer they stay on your website, the more attention they pay to your message. And the greater the chance that you can convince them to take the action you want.
Search engines such as Google take the speed of a website into account in the search results. With similar websites, the fastest websites are shown higher in the search results. A good search engine optimisation strategy is actually not possible without a fast website.
Some browsers have an option to analyse your site. Google Chrome has an "Inspect" option with which you can test the speed of your website via "lighthouse". As well as the best method, accessibility and search engine optimization of your website.
There are also online tools with which you can analyse the speed of your website. See "Learn more" for some tools.
Several factors influence having a fast website:
Choose your hosting on quality and not on price. The "too cheap" seems interesting to some, but a slow website will cost you more because it delivers less. For a fast website you choose quality hosting:
Many websites work with a Content Management System that makes the website very dynamic and flexible. When creating articles, the textual content is stored in a database. The images are stored as files.
When a page is shown to a visitor, the page is put together on the spot. The text is extracted from the database and merged with the images and design. Calling up a database, looking up the data and displaying that data takes more time than retrieving a previously saved page with the same information.
That previously compiled page can be saved for a certain time (e.g. 15 minutes) (= cache) and can be retrieved and shown to other visitors faster. This allows you to make a fast website even faster.
A page of a website contains text, images, formatting (HTML), design (CSS), scripts (JavaScript) and fonts (fonts). Of course, you want a website that looks good. But if you want a fast website, you have to take this into account:
A Content Management System is very flexible. You can easily expand the functionality by installing extensions (plugins). However, the more extensions are active on a page, the slower your website will be. Consciously choose only what is really needed and determine what influence the extensions have on the speed.
A text-only website is a very fast website. But boring and not attractive to read. Pictures contain a lot more data that has to be sent from the server to the visitor's browser. To get a fast website, you need to send as little data as possible. You can do this by optimising the images:
* according to Peter Martin
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