How fast should my website be?

Rev · Jun 3, 2015

Hello everyone!

I'm new here and I hope I'm asking the right questions in the right place. If not, please let me know!
Someone told me that my website is way too slow. It is a fairly small website for a non-profit group hosted with GoDaddy. The website takes about 9 second to load, but I know some of that is because some of the pictures are too big so I need to work on fixing that too.

I'm just wondering, how fast should a website be? Trying to figure out what my goal should be and how much time I should devote to making it faster.

Thanks in advance!!

:thankyou:

RDO Servers · Jun 3, 2015

Hey Rev, Welcome to Webmaster Sun!

The general rule to to have your page load in 2 seconds or less. Now this doesn't mean the every site must load this fast. What is a reasonable loading time for your site depends on what your site is for.

Google loads in 1 second or less. Then again, it's a simple page with 1 text box and a few links. Of course it should be fast.
Amazon loads in about 5 seconds. All of the images and dynamic content are going to take longer to load, no matter what you do!

Most of the people visiting Google are trying to do a quick search, so it needs to be fast. Most of the people visiting Amazon are ready to browse around and do some shopping, so their less likely to leave if the site doesn't load in 2 seconds.

Now consider your site. What is it for? Who are your visitors? What do they expect from your site?

9 second is quite slow and it is a good idea to work on this!
Optimizing your images is a great first step.
If you use a platform like Wordpress, make sure you have the optimization plugins installed and configured properly.
GoDaddy is not known for having the fastest or most reliable hosting. You may want to consider an alternative.
If your visitors are scattered geographically, you may benefit from using a CDN ("Content Delivery Network")
Test your site with https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and see what other advice it gives you.

Hope this helps!

Rev · Jun 4, 2015

Thank you for your explanation!

ElixantTechnology · Jun 4, 2015

There are a lot of ways to make your website faster, the first one would be to move away from GoDaddy as a Web Hosting provider. The next would be to evaluate the software that powers your website. Do you use Wordpress for your website? If so, using a plugin like WP Total Cache can increase page load times by using caching methods. Note that depending on GoDaddy's server configurations I can't vouch whether or not all of the features will be compatible.

Nytshade · Jun 5, 2015

9 seconds is too slow, the best thing you can do is to contact your web host they'll let you know what's best for their servers. But just like everyone said above, stay away from Godaddy or any EIG company.

But what I did for my sites to load faster, was to compress images. If you're on wordpress then get WP Smush or any other plugin to compress all your images. You can also try a "lazy load" plugin, this will make images load as the visitor keeps scrolling down.

Make sure you also clean the trash, delete spam comments, unapproved comments, draft posts, post revision, inactive plugins and themes. Try everything

Then use a Caching plugin, you can choose between WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache or any other caching tool. After trying both plugins, I find W3 Total Cache easy to configure and it made my sites load faster.

One more thing you can do is to reduce adverts if you have a lot of them. Also make sure you check malware and keep your website updated (cms, plugins and themes). All that should help you push your site to take at least about 5 seconds to load, which is not bad.

Finally, check your website using PageSpeed Insight by Google or gtmetrix.com. Both will let you know why your site is loading slow then you simply read the errors and fix the problem. Then check if the error is fixed, if it is then you move on to the next one till you're satisfied.

Hope that helps.

MightWeb · Jun 7, 2015

Apart from switching hosts (which I'd recommend, since GoDaddy is not known for being neither a great hosting company, nor particullarly quick) - look into the aforementioned caching plugins. If you're not using WordPress, I'd also look into the following:

- Minimize & Combine all of your CSS/Javascript. Typically a maximum of two javascript files is what I'd go for, and one CSS file.
There are tools to minimize your code (which is basically just removing all whitespaces and unneccessary delimiters).
Every time a visitor comes onto your website, they need to make a request for each file you have on it that they need to load. By combining files, you remove a lot of these unneccessary requests.

- Sprite your images. Instead of having your visitor request multiple images when loading your site, make a sprite and load the position when placing images. Here's a site I use: http://instantsprite.com/
This once again means your visitors will only need to fetch ONE image, instead of having to fetch perhaps eight or nine, depending on the size of your page.

- Leverage browser caching. You can actually tell browsers to cache certain file types in your .htaccess-file. This is rather important, as it makes sure that return visitors get a very (very) quick siteload.

- Use a CDN. We use MaxCDN for all of our Javascript, CSS, the sprites, and so on. Any static file can be cached on there, and helps put strain off of your host, as well as serve it more quickly to other countries.

How fast should my website be?

Rev

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RDO Servers

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Rev

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ElixantTechnology

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Nytshade

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MightWeb

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