“Your website has ‘less than 10 seconds’ to impress”, claims Paul Brent in his recent article on TheGlobeAndMail.com. He proceeds to describe how Complex2Clear, a Toronto company has rebranded itself to be able to “engage” a user within 10 seconds and turn that user into a customer. The rebranding has touched everything, not merely the website speed – but imagine that of those 10 seconds you have to impress and engage a potential customer five are wasted while the page is loads in the browser. That’s a scary thought. If “a bounce rate over 30 per cent is a signal that a company is likely doing something wrong with its web presence”, as mentioned in the article, a bounce rate over 70 per cent is catastrophic, and a slow loading page can very easily cause this kind of a catastrophe.

People do tend to “bounce” when it takes ages for a page to load up, and in terms of the World Wide Web “ages” last just a few seconds. So, if your page loads too slowly, you may never get a chance even to start engaging your user.

The post More than 10 seconds to impress? Now that’s tough! appeared first on Magic Web Solutions UK.

The article written by David Moth for eConsultancy.com is rather long and covers a wide range of speed-related issues, from users’ loyalty to SEO to mobile websites. He also provides tips for speeding up a website and a collection of links to online tools that can be used to test your website’s speed.

The article is addressed mainly to the owners of e-shops, including mobile shops and contains charts that illustrate the importance of website speed better than words do. The most interesting tips the article gives is the one about Gzip – the rest of them are more or less common. But the statistics connecting the loyalty of users/shoppers with the page load speed are very impressive and prove beyond doubt that speeding up your website is crucial if you are interested in customers and revenue.

The post David Moth on the importance of website speed appeared first on Magic Web Solutions UK.

On October 10, Google announced that its mod_pagespeed 1.0 module is no longer bet. According to Midsize Insider, it means that business standards for website speed are set higher than before. According to us it means that website owners who haven’t paid mugh attention to the performance of their web resources have something to think about, urgently. On the web, not following the latest trends can cost a business owner a lot.

mod_pagespeed 1.0 is an open-source Apache module that automatically optimises web pages for better speed. It can be (and is) used not only by individual websites, but also by hosting providers. By developing it and moving it out of beta the Google team have proved once again that they are committed to a better and faster web. Are you?

The post Google doing more for website speed appeared first on Magic Web Solutions UK.

But the article is a good one. It does mention a few fresh facts, for example that “a website that loads in 1.7 seconds is faster than 75% of all sites on the web”.

Anyone would like to be on that 25% – if only to gain an “increased ad revenue”, a “lower bounce rate” and the rest of benefits listed by Jobette Escobanas on Business2Community.com. The author also mentions a few tips on how to achieve that, and though her list is far less comprehensive than Yahoo!’s, it will do for beginners who are just starting on the problem of website speed. She mentions HTML/CSS and smaller file sizes – obvious, but still often overlooked.

And of course, she also brings to our attention that the search engine now use the response time of the web page as a ranking factor. You haven’t forgotten that, have you?

The post Website’s loading time affects business? That’s no news… appeared first on Magic Web Solutions UK.

In the eariler posts we mentioned Google many times to demonstrate to our readers that the most popular search engine in the world pays a lot of attention to website speed and even uses it as a ranking factor. But Google is not the only search engine. Yahoo! is also very popular. What do they have to say on website speed? Are they interested at all?

Yes, they are. A long and highly technical page in their developers’ area proves it. The article is called “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site” and contains a lot of tips, which no webmaster can afford to overlook, especially if they are in charge of larger websites.

Of the long list of their tips, “Put Stylesheets at the Top” and “Put Scripts at the Bottom” are probably the easiest to follow. “Avoid CSS Expressions” and “Reduce the Number of DOM Elements” may interfere with some webmasters’ desire to write “cool” code that will impress their colleagues, but then having lousy download speed is undeniably uncool. As usual, the idea is to keep reasonable balance. But the majority of the tips are just very helpful. What we can say for certain is that it takes a lot of expertise to implement most of them. So, if you would like to speed up your website and prefer a holistic approach to things and the best possible results, consider outsourcing this job to experts.

The post What Yahoo! has to say about website speed appeared first on Magic Web Solutions UK.

This time it’s not Yahoo! but Brian Taylor who writes for Business2Community and is the Project Manager at Forix. His tips are easier to understand and implement, but just as useful and important. “Use CSS sprites for images” is one of the most interesting ones. It means that browsers that don’t support CSS3, but are still widely used, like IE8, will need special consideration. Why does it always have to be IE?

“Clear all unnecessary spaces” doesn’t look very obvious, but it’s a good tip. “Make the content brief”… well, here we go again. There must be something about it if each and every website speed expert mentions it. If you often visit websites that publish long articles, you might have noticed that the latest trend is to break them up into two or three pages. That, too, is done for the purpose of speeding up the pages’ download.

The post More design considerations for website speed appeared first on Magic Web Solutions UK.

In his presentation about kanban system Jim Benson says:
“And one of our teams I can’t name yet, because they told me I can’t yet, so I call them x77d, they also got tons of money. And they staffed way up and they got all these offshore teams in India and they blasted forward and two years later they had produced absolutely nothing. And during the last year of those two years they spent the whole time fighting about what their processes should be. We are not doing Scrum right, we are not doing this right, we are not doing that right and they are fighting back and forth. So then they went back for their next round of funding and much like Info Move the V.C. said ‘dude you didn’t do anything’. So they laid off everybody but 12 people and six months later they had a working system.”

You need to fast foward to 49th minute of his presentation to hear him talking about that.

The post How small software development team can deliver more then a larger team? appeared first on Magic Web Solutions UK.

Velocity Europe 2012 is underway. Hundreds of web operations and web performance specialists are already exchanging their knowledge, techniques and tips on faster and stronger web, and those who would love to attend but weren’t destined to are looking forward to video reports.

“Performance equals revenue” has been one of the dominating themes during the first day, and no wonder. There is hardly any doubt about that anymore.

The post Velocity has been brought to London appeared first on Magic Web Solutions UK.