Just how fast and reliable is your hosting service?
Whilst we’d all like to think that our website is amongst the fastest and most dependable around, it’s better to know that it’s fast and reliable.
How long does it take to load? You can find this out with the speed test at iWebTool (an excellent source of website tools). So, for example, it says that this website loads in 0.03 seconds which is pretty reasonable. However, that test is from here and if you run exactly the same test from somewhere else in the world the results will be different (which is one reason why we host some sites both in America and in the UK).
Naturally, part of that will depend on the design of your own website. For example, it’s increasingly common for people to copy photos straight from their digital camera directly onto their website. That’s one sure way of slowing down the loading of your site quite dramatically. Typically a low-end digital camera these days will produce an image of over 1MB in size vs the size of the photo here of 11k. If you upload the full-size digital images then you’re looking at a website that takes nearly 100 times as long to load as it needs to. So, step one in improving the speed of your website is to reduce the resolution of the images.
What about the reliability? The easiest way to keep tabs on reliability is to sign up with one of the website monitoring services such as HyperSpin. If you’ve loads of websites you might need to upgrade to their paid services but even the free service is pretty good. We keep tabs on three different hosts that hold our websites and interestingly it’s the cheapest one that’s the most reliable (and, so far, has had the quickest and most useful responses to our support questions too).
Generally speaking, you can usually do something about the speed of your website but can’t really control the reliability short of moving to a new hosting service (which is much easier than you might think). In terms of speed, look first at the size of the images that you are using: full-screen is rarely appropriate in the main text (you can always make the image click-through to the full-size version) and never, ever upload images directly from your camera without resizing them first.
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