We were asked by a local firm here in Windsor to see if there was anything we could do to speed up their website.
They knew that slow sites give a poor impression to customers and that slow page load times negatively affect conversions. They also understood that sluggish pages result in prospective customers simply getting bored of waiting and visiting competitors speedier sites instead.
It’s for these reasons that our new client made the sensible decision to ask us for advice. We met with them at the start of the week and dug into the reasons why their site was slow. Server hosting was identified as a major factor and it was decided that moving to a new server was the required solution.
By Friday we had successfully duplicated their website onto faster servers. We then spent time making improvements to the site architecture and caching options to ensure faster load times.
Great Speedup Results
This afternoon we tested both old and new homepages at https://gtmetrix.com to check that our hard work had indeed produced the required results.
The old site was typically taking 5.2 seconds to be fully loaded. The new site loads in just 1.2 seconds. This is a great results that should pay big dividends in terms of more visitors and higher conversion rates.
Here’s How We Did It
So, as mentioned we moved to a faster server. But there was more to it than that.
- We ensured we were running the latest version of PHP
- We ensured the database was on a recent version of mySQL
- We turned on Gzip compression
- We optimised images
- We optimised loading order
- We ensured browser caching was set up correctly
- We compressed and concatenated css files and js files
We will also be suggesting things the client can do to ensure the site stays whirring away at its new lightning pace for years to come.
If your website is a bit sluggish, call the team at Immedia Creative and let us show you just how fast your site could be running.
