Your sales suffer when site doesn't perform well. According to a study by JupiterResearch 75% of online shoppers who experience a site that freezes, crashes, is too slow, is hard to navigate, or has a complicated checkout process will leave the site without completing their purchase or never buy from it again. So what can you do to make sure that your site is running properly? Well we've compiled 7 ways to help you improve your sites performance.
how often do you wait for paint to dry?
What?! never? Well you're not alone. If your site is slow, your sales will be too. JupiterResearch recommends that your site should take no more than four seconds to load or you will loose clients. Google has a couple of great tools to help you measure your sites perfomance. Google's Page Speed is an add on that will help you measure individual pages and find the best ways to speed them up.
Google's webmaster tools is another great tool for checking your sites speed. Webmaster tools will provide you with a chart like the one below showing how your site's average page load time changes over a period of a few months.
For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all websites, separating slow and fast load times. The site in the example graph takes 1.7 seconds to load as of May 17, 2010. This is faster than 75% of sites.
Whenever you add anything to your website – new content, new images, or new pages — check that content is optimized to keep the site streamlined and your pages loading quickly.
how often do you wait for paint to dry?
What?! never? Well you're not alone. If your site is slow, your sales will be too. JupiterResearch recommends that your site should take no more than four seconds to load or you will loose clients. Google has a couple of great tools to help you measure your sites perfomance. Google's Page Speed is an add on that will help you measure individual pages and find the best ways to speed them up.
Google's webmaster tools is another great tool for checking your sites speed. Webmaster tools will provide you with a chart like the one below showing how your site's average page load time changes over a period of a few months.
Whenever you add anything to your website – new content, new images, or new pages — check that content is optimized to keep the site streamlined and your pages loading quickly.
Some HTML editors include features that tell you a document's weight – or a page's load time at various connection speeds – and most image editing software products indicate file size load times at various connection speeds for your convenience.
Test on multiple browsers, screen resolutions, and platforms.
Just because your website looks good and functions correctly in one browser doesn't mean it will look as good or even work in other browser, different monitor, or operating system. When developing your website or making any updates we always recommend using all W3C qualified code and checking the site in multiple browswers, platforms, and screen resolutions.
Checking your site in different platforms can be difficult as most businesses or individuals do not use multiple operating systems, but you should be able to check your site in multiple browsers and with different screen resolutions fairly easily.
Checking your site in different platforms can be difficult as most businesses or individuals do not use multiple operating systems, but you should be able to check your site in multiple browsers and with different screen resolutions fairly easily.
The five most popularly used browswers are listed below. If your site functions well in all five of these your site will function well for over 98% of users.
Most Used Browsers
- Chrome
- Firefox
- IE6-IE8
- Opera
- Safari
If you have the availability to check your site in multiple platforms here are the five most commonly used operating systems in order of decending popularity.
Most Used Operating systems
- WinXP
- Win7
- Vista
- Mac
- Linux
Check your site in different display sizes to ensure that your elements stay in the right locations. Screen display sizes also may or may not reflect the actual dimensions of the viewable web page. Many users don't expand their browser to fill the entire screen. A great tool to test your site is Google's Browswer Size. Browser Size shows you exactly what percentage of people will see what aspects of your site. Be sure to conduct testing that accounts for this wide range of variability – not just the standard maximum screen resolutions.
Once you have connected an analytics software to your site you will be able to see what operating systems, screen resolutions, and browsers your clients are using and are likely to use in future. As part of your anlytics checks, go over your trends in browser and platform statistics semi-regularly.
Once you have connected an analytics software to your site you will be able to see what operating systems, screen resolutions, and browsers your clients are using and are likely to use in future. As part of your anlytics checks, go over your trends in browser and platform statistics semi-regularly.
test your links
Have you ever wasted 10 minutes on a site trying to get to a certain page? Probably not. If your sites links don't work, your clients have other sites they can go to. It's always good to manually check your links as no software is intuitive enough to know if the link is going where it should, but if you have a plethora of links you may want to use a link checking software. We recommend the W3C Link Checker, it can check for valid, broken, and redirected links.
test out your error pages
Error pages? I thought the point was not to have errors?! You've seen 404 and other errors come up when you request a page that doesn't exist. Try going to google.com/asljkdfl; and you'll get an error page. Your goal is to help contain clients even when they encounter broken links or other issues on your site. Intentionally put in incorrect extensions of your URL just as a potential client might do, this will allow you to check that the appropriate error pages are in place. It is best if your error pages include helpful information and links to help the client find the appropriate page.
make sure all downloads work
Check to ensure that all your download links point to the correct files and that the download files exist.
check your secure sockets layers.
...what?
check your secure sockets layers.
...what?
Have you ever wondered what the difference in http:// and https:// pages are? SSL is commonly used to encrypt online transactions or other sensitive data on a webpage. If you have secured pages your SSL URLs should all begin with https://. This is an indication to your visitors that the page is protected by SSL, and to you that you are getting what you paid for. Browswers will generally also give another means to identify a secured page such as a "lock" icon at the bottom of the browser, or turning the address bar green.
test your forms
Test to make sure that any forms you have on your site send the information to the right place and that they're only submitted when all the required fields have been completed. There is nothing worse than seeing that you have an interested customer and then finding out their submission doesn't make sense or is missing information... or even worse never getting their request at all! Make sure to try to make a few different errors also. This allows you to see all of your error messages and ensure that they are helpful to the client filling out the form.
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