Speed

Your website's speed is important to provide the best user experience possible; they're looking for quick answers and immediate results. Not only does your site's speed affect the user experience, but also your potential customers, jeopardizing potential sales and conversions.

The average user does not have the patience to wait until your page loads — the expectation is two seconds or less. Three seconds is a lifetime as it relates to today's web speed; unfortunately, users will leave your site for your competition.

And just as speed influences users' behaviour, search engines also care about it. Speed ultimately affects your search rankings, too. Yes, it's true. Speed is a ranking factor in Google. If you have a fast website (all things being equal) and your competitor is slower, even slightly, your site will be ranked higher.

According to Google, it will "reduce the amount of crawlers it sends to your site if your server is slower than two seconds."In other words, you want to ensure your site is optimized for speed so that Google doesn't miss picking up your latest blog, or other recent updates. Maintaining fast load times will not only improve your ranking but it will also help you gain more organic traffic.

Yardstick Services can help optimize the load time of your site and adjust these common factors that cause sluggish performance. To boost your digital speed, these actions include, but are not limited to the following:

• Code: We eliminate excess code. Lines of code slow down the browser from reading your site and displaying it; we condense code and make it as minimal and tight as possible.
• Images: High-resolution images can consume a lot of bandwidth while loading so we ensure images are optimized. We compress, resize and crop images depending on the resolution our client requires.
• Google Tag Manager: We load things asynchronously, i.e. we load one thing from one server while something else is loading to another server, usually scripts and tags (a snippet of code), which can sometimes slow down the loading of your site. Therefore, we'll use Google Tag Manager to help it load faster by managing all those tags within Google's infrastructure rather than on our server.
• Caching: We use caching, a temporary storage of frequently accessed data on your website that allows for quick and easy retrieval. By saving copies of your website on different servers around the world, it will speed up data retrieval and can serve that website locally as opposed to trying to serve someone in Hong Kong from a server that's located in Vancouver, for example.
• Compression: Akin to a zip file, we use compression, which allows your web server to provide smaller file sizes so they load faster for your website users. This speeds up the load time because not as much data has to be transferred from point A to point B.

Let Yardstick Services help make your customer's user experience enjoyable and efficient. If you have any questions on website load speed or server response times, we'd like to hear from you. If you are looking for information about our Maintenance & Support package, please feel free to send us an email or give us a call: 604.474.3631.