Why you need a fast company website

Rodolfo

Nowadays, it’s essentially impossible for a business to survive without some sort of online presence. One of the more traditional tools at the disposal of companies is that all-time great, the company website, but businesses often neglect the importance of optimizing said website for speed. In this article, we’ll give you everything you need to know about why you need a fast company website and how to achieve that goal.

First things first: why you need a company website at all

There’s a chance you may be wondering why you would actually need a website for your company in the first place. After all, hasn’t social media basically taken its place as the digital calling card of a business?

Well… no, it hasn’t. Recent events throughout 2021 have shown more clearly than ever that social media does not replace the need for a website. In fact, outages in major social websites and communication platforms are becoming increasingly more common, with entire networks such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp finding themselves down for the count all at once. During the worst outage, which lasted hours, many companies found themselves with no online presence, because their business relied entirely on social media profiles to make itself known online.

That’s not the only reason, however. Owning your very own corporate website, more than avoiding the rare social media outage, means owning a place online that is entirely yours. Which is to say, on social media, you don’t actually own your company pages or profiles; they can very easily decide to remove your presence entirely if they so choose. If you have your own website, though, it’s yours and no one can take it away from you (except for some outage on your web hosting service, which is why you really need reliable hosting).

Having your own website and domain also grants you a great deal more credibility than a simple social profile. Anyone can create a shoddy social media account in a few clicks, but a professional-grade, well-designed website with your own domain costs both time and money, making it a privilege, and potential customers know that. It’s a way to stand out from your competition as well as a way of owning your very own digital address.

Why your website needs to be lightning-fast

Now that the reasons for owning a website are clear, let’s go back to the reason as to why it needs to be fast—or better yet, instantaneous.

The first and major reason is usability: users have grown progressively more impatient as technology evolved. In fact, Google’s own research shows that the probability of users bouncing (leaving the site after visiting only one page) increases 32% if page loading takes between 1 and 3 seconds, with it growing even worse the longer the page takes to load. Therefore, if you want to convert organic visitors into customers, you’re going to need a website that doesn’t make them leave immediately.

The other big reason is search engine optimization. Ranking first on valuable keywords is a very appealing (and lucrative) proposition for businesses online and a fast website is key to that. Recently, Google changed their criteria to include usability factors called Core Web Vitals, one of which, Largest Contentful Paint, emphasizes loading speed, measured by the largest piece of content that is loaded above-the-fold. As Google focuses more and more on site speed as a metric, so too should your company.

Essentially, to be competitive online, speed is crucial for a business website.

How to make your website faster

There are a multitude of ways to make a website faster, so we’ll just give you the rundown of some of the best ways to do it in a way that will stand the test of time (ensuring that your site continues to jump up in the Google ranks as time goes on).

Choose the right web hosting solution

More often than not, companies spend a lot of time and money on developing their corporate website, then pick the cheapest shared hosting solution they can find to actually put it online. That usually means servers stretched thin and few resources allocated per website, making even the best optimized website run slow and take too long to respond, more noticeable on the time to first byte (TTFB), i.e. the time it takes for the server to actually respond to the user request.

Not only that, but many hosting providers run their shared hosting on obsolete server software and outdated versions of PHP. In layman’s terms, the engine powering your fancy modern website is ancient and slow, making everything run that much slower.

Neoxea runs state-of-the-art web servers on LiteSpeed Web Servers, the best and fastest server software, particularly for (but not limited to) WordPress websites, making it an ideal choice for a web hosting service with reliable support to host a fast company website.

Reduce the amount of code on the page

Another common issue, particularly prevalent with content management systems, is an overabundance of code on each page of your website.

Premade themes and plug-ins often add extra JavaScript or CSS files to the source code of your website’s pages, meaning that not only does each page have a bunch of extraneous code to load (making it slower), but also that the browser has to request each of those files individually to load the page, often stopping the loading process altogether when it does.

The quick and easy solution here is just to go with the old maxim: less is more. Go for a light theme that loads rapidly on its own and make sure you select only truly necessary plug-ins for your corporate website, preferably some that are lightweight and don’t add bits and bobs that you do not need.

Optimize your images

Page speed is directly correlated with page weight, that is, how many kilobytes (or megabytes) the browser has to load to show the page. One of the most common causes for larger pages is both the amount and individual weight of each image present on the page (websites tend to be notoriously image-heavy).

With that in mind, what you can do to reduce page weight and therefore make it snappier is optimize your images, by which we mean reduce their total file sizes, thus making the overall page lighter.

Here’s a few ideas on how to optimize your images for the Web:

  • If you use image editing software like Photoshop, you can save the images for Web or with slightly less quality, which will be unnoticeable for most users but will greatly reduce image size;
  • You can use image compression software like Squoosh.app or a plug-in to manually or automatically reduce the file size with little loss of perceived image quality;
  • Install our Plugin with integrated capabilities to optimize the size of images files and use WebP format (developed by Google) which is the modern way to provide superior lossless and lossy compression of images on the web.

How to check your corporate website’s page speed

Finally, to test the results and check whether your website needs a little speed boost or has improved after switching servers or optimizing it, there are some tools that will measure page speed and also give you suggestions on what to improve. Our two recommendations are:

We hope these tips are useful to your company! If you have any questions on how to improve your website speed and what hosting services to pick, feel free to check in with our Hosting Experts.