How slow is your website in New York, London, Sydney?
Hi
About 5 months ago I built a site for a friend. Shortly after she started to get visitor feedback that the site pages seemed slow to load in the browser.
To be honest my initial response was a bit dismissive, "they're probably on dial-up", "got poor broadband" in other words - it was something wrong their end. After a few emails the site owner did some follow-up and to cut a very loooong story short discovered that the site loaded significantly slower in the US (5 x slower), where most of her business came from, than it did on her PC in the UK.
For her the site loaded fast from her pc, but as she discovered, her international customers (not just the US, she does a good slice of business in Australia a well) were having a very different experience. To say she was horrified would be an understatement.
She rang me in a panic saying that she had no doubt this was losing her business, after all people just won't wait and she already knew from feedback that this was a frustrating issue for her visitors. She told me in very definate terms that she wanted the speed of her increased improved.
I've learnt a lot recently about website speed and it made we aware of the business you could be losing if your site loads slowly where your customers are located. The distance between the server where your site is hosted and the customer viewing your site effects their speed experience of the site.
My friend hosts her site in the UK, does business mostly in the UK, US and OZ - in 2 out of her 3 customer countries her site was loading up to 5 times slower. Just image the impact of this on an online business? If your site is slow, customers won't wait = business lost.
I host all of my sites in the US but was still shocked with my web page download times.
I am now going through a speed optimization process to ensure her site loads faster internationally.
I'm just making this post to raise the issue that its worth checking out how fast (or slow) your site loads in countries where you make money and making sure your pages load as fast as possible there.
Hope our experience helps someone else.
Cheers
About 5 months ago I built a site for a friend. Shortly after she started to get visitor feedback that the site pages seemed slow to load in the browser.
To be honest my initial response was a bit dismissive, "they're probably on dial-up", "got poor broadband" in other words - it was something wrong their end. After a few emails the site owner did some follow-up and to cut a very loooong story short discovered that the site loaded significantly slower in the US (5 x slower), where most of her business came from, than it did on her PC in the UK.
For her the site loaded fast from her pc, but as she discovered, her international customers (not just the US, she does a good slice of business in Australia a well) were having a very different experience. To say she was horrified would be an understatement.
She rang me in a panic saying that she had no doubt this was losing her business, after all people just won't wait and she already knew from feedback that this was a frustrating issue for her visitors. She told me in very definate terms that she wanted the speed of her increased improved.
I've learnt a lot recently about website speed and it made we aware of the business you could be losing if your site loads slowly where your customers are located. The distance between the server where your site is hosted and the customer viewing your site effects their speed experience of the site.
My friend hosts her site in the UK, does business mostly in the UK, US and OZ - in 2 out of her 3 customer countries her site was loading up to 5 times slower. Just image the impact of this on an online business? If your site is slow, customers won't wait = business lost.
I host all of my sites in the US but was still shocked with my web page download times.
I am now going through a speed optimization process to ensure her site loads faster internationally.
I'm just making this post to raise the issue that its worth checking out how fast (or slow) your site loads in countries where you make money and making sure your pages load as fast as possible there.
Hope our experience helps someone else.
Cheers