Blazing Fast Websites

What makes Peter's websites blazing fast and why does it matter?

A 0.1 second improvement of mobile site speed increases conversion rates by 8.4% for retail sites and 10.1% for travel sites.

Real-world Impact of a Fast Website

Improving your website speed is one of the most important aspects to web design. Fast websites make a huge difference.

Every millisecond makes a difference, so having a blazing fast website has a tremendous impact. Studies have shown time and time again that even the most marginal increases in speed matter for sales big time. Before you hire a web designer, make sure you know how fast their websites are.

Testing Website Speed

Rather than listening to why a web design company makes the fastest websites, it's actually quite simple and easy to test them out for yourself.

There are several speed-testing websites out there. The most popular one is Google's PageSpeed. This service offers you the ability to plug in any website address and see how fast it takes to load. Do keep in mind though, that Google PageSpeed's servers are located somewhere in the United States, so they won't accurately reflect your local loading times if you are located in East Yorkshire or anywhere in the United Kingdom.

There are some other services like GTMetrix that can measure speeds directly from London, giving you a more representational loading time. The default GTMetrix testing location is set to Vancouver, Canada. It requires you to set up a user to change it.

If you're doing business in the UK, it would be wise and worth your time for you to do the following:

Grab the addresses of the two web designer's websites (or better yet - visit their portfolios and grab the address from one of their clients!).
Head on over the GTMetrix and create an account (as far as my experience goes they won't send you any spam).
Once you're logged in, click on the server location below the URL bar until it says London, UK.
Plug in the address one at a time and compare the LCP ("Largest Content Element" - that's basically the indicator of how many seconds a person waits before they see your website).

Looking at Peter Makes Websites

Example picture of a GTMetrix score. 223ms load time for petermakeswebsites.co.uk.

223ms is 0.22 seconds. Less than a quarter of a second. Blazing fast?

Looking at competitors websites

This was done using the first five organic links from a Google search for "East Yorkshire Web Design". Organic means not paid advertising. I didn't click on any of my competitor's paid ads because that's just not cool. I also didn't include their names. You can test yourself!

The secret to making websites really fast?

There's no one secret, it's actually a result of doing a ton of research and experimenting making sure every layer of the server is working as efficiently as possible. All while keeping costs down (this website costs less than £8 per month in hosting fees). There's a lot of technical terminology around this I won't bore you with, but here are the layers mostly simplified:

Using the most recent and quick database software.
Communication between the web server and the database.
Optimisation of the actual website content (load sequence of all the different components, scripts, style files, images, fonts, etc).
Caching pages on the server (a smart website knows the parts that haven't changed since you last viewed it, so it doesn't need to re-process the whole thing every time).
Using the fastest web hosting platform.
International optimisation using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This allows for an international network of servers to hold onto your content. It's essential for international businesses.

All these layers when optimised and working harmiously together create a lightning fast website. This is how I am able to get the performance. And the fact I know how to set up and install these layers (collectively called a "stack") on a blank server means you only really have to pay for the blank server, and I take care of the rest. This is what keeps costs so low.