How often do you go to a website and sit there waiting for it to display on your screen? And waiting and waiting and waiting……….

Chances are that website is either;

Badly designed
Is hosted on an inferior or overloaded server
Has photos which use up way too much ram
Has some arty-farty flash presentation which needs too much time to load

S..L..O..W loading websites are bad for business, period. Whilst your website may be important to you, a new visitor coming to your website looking for your goods or services probably found you on Google along with a number of your competitors websites offering similar or identical products and services. Now if you believe that prospective customers will actually sit there and wait for your site to load rather than click the “<” back button and go on to the next website you are sadly mistaken. The internet is all about speed and convenience and slow websites are not the flavor of the day.

Another serious issue to consider is Google’s recent announcement that having a slow website can impact on your website’s Google ranking. This isn’t a threat, it’s simply Google announcing that “fast is good” and that fast websites give Google users a better search experience. The above link will also point you towards Google webmaster tools to help you assess and fix your website but in my experience most business owners will leave this to their web designers. My suggestion is that you talk to your web host first. The company which hosts your website will often give you a much clearer picture of the problem because they didn’t design your website and therefore won’t be too embarrassed to admit that they “stuffed up”. If in fact you have opted for their “bottom self”, “el cheapo”, 10 cents a day hosting plans then you may well heed their advice to upgrade to a better / faster hosting plan.