Lousy page load bad for business

Did you ever visit a website page that took ages to load and that you closed because you were tired to wait on it? We are sure you did.

Today many businesses still use websites that use large images, large PDF brochures and other multimedia content that slows down your website. What most of the people do, they leave the website. Google defines the bounce rate, as follows : when a visitor leave your website after 4 seconds, then this considered as a bounce. So, your web page needs to load as fast as possible in order to keep the visitor (with interesting content of course).

Page load time indicates the time needed to download and view the whole content of a web page in the browser window. This parameter is also called “page speed” (speed of the page load). Page load time has calculated from the beginning, when you click on a link or type a web address, to the completion, when the page is fully loaded. Is usually measured in seconds and it is formed by two components:

• Network and Server Time: is based on the internet connection speed and on how rapidly static elements as photos are displayed
• Browser time: how long does it take to analyze and execute the entire document and make the page available for the interaction with users

The same web page could have different page load times according to the type of browser used (i.g. Safari vs Internet Explorer), the device (i.g. mobile vs desktop) and the geographical location of the user. For instance, if your website uses a datacenter in America but you have also customers in Europe, they may suffer a slower page load time. Using a Content Delivery Network solutions (CDN) you can deliver your contents all over the world keeping high performance, and the issue is easily solved. In the same way, web pages of the same website could have radically different page load times, due to the developer’s decision on the content’s richness, page structure, functionalities, number of element on the page.

Why page load time is important

Nowadays, especially for the popularity of e-commerce sites and online shopping, a fast page load time is essential for a website. First, page load time affects search engine rankings. Google uses a particular algorithm to determine a website positioning, and the page speed is one of the factors analyzed. That means Google guides shoppers to faster web contents.

In addition to ranking, the page load time optimization has a great influence on customer’s satisfaction. The speed at which you can complete the purchase generates clients satisfied for the online experience and a more likely conversion from interest to sales. In addition, a pleasant experience feeds a positive word of mouth, by increasing the popularity of the brand and, indirectly, the potential sales.

In fact, page load time drastically affects also the bounce rate, that is the percentage of website abandonment by users. That means once they have visited your e-commerce, they leave and will never return. To give you a more concrete idea about what we are saying here, let’s see some numbers.

The data tell us that just a second more in the page load time produces a loss of 11% of page views, 16% of customers satisfaction and, the most important number, a loss of 7% in the conversion rate. Besides, more than a half of users (51%) don’t complete the purchase if the website is too slow and 1 in 2 abandon it if it takes more than 3 seconds to be displayed.

Page load time is influenced by many factors. It depends on the infrastructure that hosts the website and on its optimization, bandwidth, web page design, as well as the amount, type and weight of contents on the page. Other elements include the user location, the device and the type of browser used, as mentioned previously. Each factor can be optimized to achieve the best page load time and boost your sales.

Do you want to improve your page load time? Feel free to contact us for a free consultation

Cyber criminals operate from all out of the world, but it is known that cyber criminals are operating from Russia, Ukraine, Romenia, China, etc.. When we launch a new website on the Internet it is available for everybody, right? So as well for Cyber criminals.

One of the techniques to limit the risks for a Cyber attack is to block or challenge regions that are registered as a risk for cyber criminals.

Using countries as an access filter in a Firewall

Using a firewall as a gatekeeper that scans all traffic, you could tell the firewall that all IP’s (Internet Protocol address) coming out of the suspicious countries must be challenged or blocked. How are they challenged? You could ask every IP address that makes the request to access your website, coming from a suspicious country, to fill in a captcha (like pointing out the traffic lights in the picture) (See picture) . This avoids malicious bots (small automated applications) to access your webserver and to try to access the backend of your website.

Blocking users from certain countries

When you block every IP address coming from for example Russia, every single user from Russia will have the message that they are not authorized to access your website. When your business is only focusing on a local audience, then this could be a very interesting feature. Did you ever receive spam messages via the website from companies in China, Russia or even the United States? With this feature this could avoided. As well for cybercriminals, access to your website will not be authorized if they are connecting from countries that you have blocked.

One positive impact can be found as well for Google Adwords campaigns. When foreign internet users are clicking on your ad, Google will recognize the blocking rule and they will also be blocked. So, this feature ensures as well a gain of money.

When your business has an international approach, we could advise to work with different local domain names where you could put this challenge or blocking rule to each of these local websites.

Conclusion

It is important to understand that without the use of a firewall, that scans all traffic to your website, your website on your origin hosting server is at great risk. Even the use of WordPress security plugins gives you a false sense of security when everything is hosted on the server of origin. We’ve personally encounted the problem several malware issues that made some websites unavailable even at hosting company that claimed to be safe. Recently, the Woocommerce plugin has been infected with a malware. Several tech sites have warned business owners to change code in the PHP files of your WordPress website. Imagine that you are a victim of this attack, you would be hanging on the phone talking with your web designer and paying him money in order to solve the problem. Wouldn’t you agree that a firewall implementation is a much smarter solution?

Do you need to buy hardware? No, not at all! At Bestwordpress Design we use a firewall that is residing elsewhere and were we redirect all traffic to. When people want to go to your website, they need to pass the firewall. Will you notice something? No, not at all?

Does a firewall have an impact on the load time of your pages? No, with a correct implementation not! Our own website is our best reference, 80 pages big, and we achieve an average load time of 2 seconds per page. Read our article “why fast page load time is important” to understand why a slow website is bad for business.

Feel free to contact us when you want to implement a firewall for your website or you have any kind of question. We would be happy to help you!