Fast loading website-points to take into consideration?

Website owners often asks us question like “I want my website to load fast.” We hear this statement from almost all who are interested in designing a website and planning on hosting. Who would want a website that after you click, you can go and make yourself a coffee while still waiting for the website to load. Slow loading website is detrimental to your business as it may drive your visitors away and search engine too are likely to give less importance to slower loading website.

So how do I make my website load fast?

This article will try and explain in simple English few points to take into considerations for your website to load faster. There are basically two major factors that determine how fast your website loads.

Website designer

While designing your website, try and minimise the use of flash and images as they take longer time to load than text. For better speed, you could implement concepts like making your buttons text based rather than images. At the same time, you wouldn’t want the website for your business to consist of text only as that would make your website boring.

What emphasis need to be taken is to have a balance of text and graphics, so that your website is appealing and at the same time loads fast. If your website specification is simple, then try and request your website designer to use HTML pages rather than using Content Management System which uses scripting and makes a lot of database query for loading single page.

Physical location of your hosting server

If your business is Internet driven or if your website is critical to your business then ideal situation would be to choose a reputed local datacenter service with a dedicated bandwidth and colocate your own server with a grunt.

Cost is also a factor for every business, implementing your own infrastructure is likely to cost above tens of thousands of dollars in setup and skill labour. Moreover you are likely to pay above thousands of dollars as monthly ongoing fee.

An alternative solutions

The above implementation may not be practical for every business so what is your alternative solutions?

The solution is virtual hosting. Virtual web hosting means where resources like hosting space, emails are allocated to you and you share the server and bandwith for internet connection with others. This works out to be cost effective solutions for most businesses.

Selecting your web hosting company

When selecting your web hosting company, there are a few questions you should ask before signing up.

1. Ask them what software they provide and if programming language used for development of your website is compatible with the server.
2. What is the server's hardware specification?
3. Ask them for example of some websites hosted on the server and notice how fast they load. Check loading speed of the websites during different times of the day. If you check a site at night you may notice that it loads faster but if you check the same website during working hours it maybe slower as many people could be viewing the other websites with from the same server.

Target audiences location

Physical location of your server is important in determining how fast your website loads and many customers are tend to be ignorant of this factor. If your primary target audiences are going to be from Melbourne region, then you should seriously consider hosting your website on a server located in Melbourne.

There are many Australian hosting companies but usually their servers are located in datacenters in the US. Datacenter is a place where servers are housed for reliability and security. As a potential customer, you should ask where their server is located physically, or if you wish to be specific, ask them where the location of their datacenter is.

Let's take two servers with same specification and same website design, one located in Melbourne and the other located in the US. The websites on servers located in Melbourne load much faster for Melbourne visitors. This is natural as distance/hops your requested packets needed to travel is less. This is mainly the region why accessing files and folder in an intranet environment is much faster.

Website on the server located in US may load fast for visitors from the US but this is of less importance to you if your target audiences are going to be from Melbourne.

If you take the above points into consideration when selecting hosting company for your website, you will have a website that is likely to provide your website visitors with an enjoyable browsing experience.