Tech Dirt

SIZE DOES MATTER! (And Smaller Is Better)

We live in a world where we are constantly judged by our possessions: the size of our house, the size of our boat, the length of time to first byte. But let's be honest, performance is where it really matters!

A few weeks ago we made adjustments to our website that decreased the overall "heaviness" of each page. What a difference it's made in performance. Heavier web pages load more slowly into web browsers. I am sure you have visited a site that was slow loading and sluggish to the point where you wanted to toss your computer. Depending on the site's hosting environment, this could occur for many reasons. In many cases it's due to the site itself.

Web usability can be affected by poor hosting, heavy pages, or even just a plain old ugly site design that shouldn't be live on the web. Whatever the cause, if a website is slow (or ugly), usability is lost.

One of the core benchmarks of success for a professional website is the little talked about bounce rate. With a heavy site, many of our site visitors were simply visiting one page on the site then heading on; however, since we've decreased our size and improved our speed and performance, they're sticking around for an encore. When I say sticking around, I mean it; we've seen the overall site bounce rate drop by an average of 20%. In a world with a average bounce rate over 50%, that tells me that we've got a lot more happy site visitors!

For more pointers on this topic, please contact us. We are happy to assist.