RealTech with Peter Boritz: Get More Website Traffic

Your website speed can be a key indicator of how many visitors go to your website and spend time learning about your organization. In addition, potential and current clients who wait too long for web pages to load may be reluctant to return to your site.

It has been proven that as little as a five percent increase in your website speed can increase page views by as much as twenty-five percent. Below are some tips to increase the speed of your website:

1. When it comes to your homepage, use facts and keep the page clean and simple. Avoid using Flash videos or animations/graphics that take too much time and bandwidth to load. In the amount of time it takes one of these large files to load, you may have already lost a potential client.
2. Don’t place video links on your homepage. Links from video sites such as YouTube not only take time to load, but often make a web page look cluttered and distracts from the information you want visitors to see.
3. If you need to place video on your site, make certain that the host of the video is within a close proximity. The longer distance the information has to travel, the longer it will take for the page to load.
4. Measure the speed of your site to identify the areas which need improvement. There are various websites, both free and paid, that can check your site for browser compatibility, optimizes images and JavaScript and more.
   

Some useful sites are:

• Aptimize.com
• Google Website Optimizer (free)
• WebsiteOptimization.com (free)

In today’s market, having an informative and well-performing website is key for your business to succeed. Don’t lose opportunities and new customers because your website is too slow.

Comments

[Phil]

Great to see you covering this issue we saw dramatic increases to our pageviews and profile registrations when we put a website accelerator across our 3 sites - we used Aptimize btw, it came out tops in our testing. Good to see you mention keeping flash off the homepage, i've see this mistake happen too many times and the sad thing is most owners think its great without realising the huge barrier it is.