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!