ACtion Magazine - April 2014 - (Page 32)

The need for speed By Angie Kilbourne, AAM T that with the knowledge that 40 percent of visitors will leave a website taking longer than three seconds to load. More importantly, data shows that 80 percent of them won't return. Consider your own Web surﬁng habits. How long will you wait for a website to load when surﬁng? Chances are the people visiting your site wait about the same amount of time. Web surfers are an impatient group. They become easily frustrated by slow response time on any website. According to Ilya Grigorik, a Google developer, a one-second delay in website response equals: ● A 7 percent loss in conversions. ● Eleven percent fewer page views. ● And a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction. That last number should make you sit up and pay attention. I don't know of anyone who plans to be in business in 10 years that would tolerate that kind of drop in customer satisfaction numbers. So how can you ﬁnd out if your website is too slow? There are a number of tools available to anyone, including Google's PageSpeed Tools, WebsiteOptimization.com (also known as webpageanalyzer.com), and Yslow.org, which uses Yahoo!'s rules for high performance. These and many others will analyze your page based on the URL you provide and produce a report that gives you recommendations where you can improve your site speed. If you don't feel up to the task of implementing these suggestions by yourself, it's time to sit down with a webmaster to review the ﬁndings and determine your next steps. Increasing your website's speed will not only make your customers happier, but it will also improve your organic ranking on search engines. That fact alone should be enough motivation to examine how your site's performance is affecting your business, your marketing efforts, and ultimately, your bottom line. ❆ photo: MACS Staff here's an interesting - and to some, alarming - trend happening with today's websites: Websites are running anywhere from 14 to 28 percent slower in 2013 than they were just a year prior, according to the experts at Radware, an application delivery and network and application security provider. With all the innovations in design, functionality and features available today, you would think that website speed wouldn't pose this type of problem. But it's precisely for those reasons, experts point out, that pages are getting bogged down. For example, today's websites feature: ● More graphics to load on pages. ● More resource requests to fulﬁll. ● More javascript code. ● More CSS (cascading style sheet) code. All of these items designed to bring people to your website and keep them there longer are creating pages that take 7.25 seconds to load on average, compared to a mere 5.94 seconds in December 2011 - a 22 percent increase. Pair The number one contributor Don't be surprised if your site speed report recommends optimizing your graphics. Photos, graphs and other visual contents need to be optimized before they're ready for Web consumption, and unfortunately, few website platforms offer built-in functionality that will crunch the 9 MB photo you just took with your smartphone into a more Web-friendly version that will load quickly on a page. Luckily, you don't have to be a Photoshop pro to convert your high-resolution (and large) photos and artwork to more manageable and Web-ready content that will upload quickly to your site and load just as quickly on your site. There are a number of online tools that can help you get from Point A to 32 ACTION * April 2014 Point B without needing a degree in graphic design, including: * WebResizer.com * PicMonkey.com * IResize.com * myImager.com Search for "online photo editor" and you will come up with a myriad of options to help you keep your graphics loading times to a more respectable range. And remember, the more photos you add to a page, the more you add to the load time. Eliminate unnecessary photos and graphics that don't serve any real purpose. There are some times when a picture really isn't worth a thousand words. http://www.WebsiteOptimization.com http://www.webpageanalyzer.com http://www.Yslow.org http://www.WebResizer.com http://www.PicMonkey.com http://www.IResize.com http://www.myImager.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ACtion Magazine - April 2014

A/C Season Opener
Networking in the Big Easy
Getting Legal
Outlook
Freeze Frame
Leonard's Law
Virtual View
Service Port
Last Watch
By the Numbers
Cooling Corner
Industry News
Association News
Letter to the editor
New Products

ACtion Magazine - April 2014