Slow is bad.

If waiting for your own business website to open is mildly irritating to you, magnify that feeling by about 10x to understand how visitors and customers  view any delays.

I recently worked on a site that was build on my production server (a dedicated server), with extremely fast load times. Once the project was complete and I moved the site to the client’s hosting account, everything seemed to go in slow motion. The account is hosted by one of if not the most popular low-cost hosting providers – who incidentally have a reputation among my colleagues as having some of the slowest hosting in the industry for database-driven websites, like WordPress sites. Cheap hosting = more crowded servers = slower speeds.

I clocked loading times on this site as slow as 68 seconds per page. Ideally, you’re looking for load times of just a couple of seconds.

Slow is also bad for SEO

It’s not just your human visitors who suffer when your site is slow – in 2010 Google began incorporating site speed as one of the many elements affecting search rankings. It’s a small element, but it’s still important. Faster websites are better for everyone!