Increase website conversion by making your website faster

In this day and age of DSL, Cable, and FIOS internet access, customers are zipping around the web faster than ever before. Despite the increase in features of web 2.0 sites and rich media, customers are demanding speedier page load times and better performance.

According to Gomez, the leader in website performance testing and availability, poor-performing websites have a definite impact on a business's bottom line:

• 1 second delays in response time can reduce conversions by 7% and customer satisfaction by 16%.
• 4 seconds is how long the average online shopper waits before going to a competitor.
• 9% is the impact on corporate revenue due to poor application performance.

Customers are demanding a high level of website performance. When they don't get it, they become frustrated and leave to transact their business elsewhere. In these tough economic times, a 9% revenue impact is huge, and can make-or-break an online endeavor.

There are several things businesses can do to help their websites load faster and provide for a better experience for their customers. And you don't have to have a huge online presence or spend a lot of money to keep your customers coming back.

1. Upgrade your website hosting. So-called "economy" hosting providers (we won't mention any names, but you know who they are) keep their costs down by cramming as many customers on one web server as possible. That means that when your hosting neighbor experiences a Slashdot effect, your site will slow down too. Upgrading your site to a better hosting provider or a dedicated server will reduce the likelihood that will happen.
2. Work with a web developer to clean up your website's code. Well-developed code is a work of art; a good developer takes pride in their code and make it elegant and simple. They will make sure that file sizes are small, there is no redundant code, and will reduce the number of calls to the server. They will memorize and live by Yahoo!'s best practices for speeding up websites. All of this combined will make your website nice and speedy.
3. Implement any caching mechanisms that are available. Every time a website has to access a database to pull data, milliseconds are added to page load time. Milliseconds might not sound like a lot of time, but when hundreds of processes take several milliseconds each, the time adds up to a bad customer experience. Many content management systems let you configure page caching, meaning the server only connects to the database once an hour or once a day to get a new version of a particular page. Wordpress is particularly bad with CPU time, which can be fixed by installing the WP-Cache plugin.
4. Load test your website early and often. Find the limits of your website before you get promoted to the first page of Digg or your content gets tweeted. Test your site to see where it needs improvement and what you can do to fix it before the Slashdot effect brings the entire site down. Free testing tools like Load Impact or Gomez's Instant Test Pro can tell you where the upper end of your site's performance is, and then you can adjust accordingly.

Following these rules won't protest you from every situation, but they will cover a great deal of customer experience concerns and keep your customers coming back for more. And happy customers means a happy bottom line.