Why Your Website Needs Speed For SEO And How RESTful API Can Help
In terms of SEO, Google judges two aspects of page speed, time above the fold and full page load – it even scores them out of 100. If your page is slow, you lose points and visibility as a result. Worse than that, you lose potential customers who do bother to click on your site. One study found that 60% of customers will abandon a page if it takes three seconds to load. In summary, page speed is an extremely important consideration for your website’s success.
By today’s standards, an industry rule of thumb is that a webpage should be loaded within around 0.5 of a second to retain interest from visitors and be attractive to use.
So, how to do this? Well, you could simply invest in a high standard web hosting service that makes sure page loading is effective. Here’s a newsflash – the cheapest hosting service is not always going to be that good. If it costs you the traffic to your site, then that’s a terrible reason for your business to fail. If you do your homework with the hosting package, it will make a difference and could be worth extra expenditure. Cheap web hosting services may sell shared hosting services to many websites and therefore this will reduce the amount of bandwidth available to each business – slowing it all down to a sluggish pace.
We know there can be a huge gulf of differences between hosting services, for example, we worked with a client to upgrade and optimise their hosting and brought the page loading speed down from a debilitating 20 seconds, to under a second.
RESTful API Boosts Webpage Loading Speeds
Another, more sure-fire way to speed up loading times, is by using an application interface known as RESTful API. The RESTful term means Representational State Transfer and it uses HTTP requests to GET (retrieve), PUT (change of update), POST (create), DELETE (remove) data.
APIs are fundamentally stateless, so nothing is retained in the service between executions – making it efficient and fast. For commanding great webpage loading times, this is worth your consideration.
For standard style SME websites that have a lot of written and visual content, it can be truly transformational in terms of performance and optimisation. However, if you have a very large ecommerce website it can become a more complicated proposition to use this method.
At Varn we are now using this on several client sites to ensure there is no delay waiting for a page to appear. What RESTful API is doing is creating a kind of virtual representation of pages that is super-efficient in the way it accesses the relevant page data.
Streamlined Web Design For Faster Responses
What this means for the coder of a website, is that processes to present content have been streamlined and the memory needed has been significantly reduced. For the visitor of the website, this means that it’s possible to flit about from page to page in seconds, with response being instantaneous.
This method strips down the connections in a website build. In a way, it is removing all the weight of connections and instructions in the back end, so its parts can move with less resistance.
At Varn we are always looking for and working with the best techniques to improve the performance of your business website. If you want a website with speed in mind, contact us for more information.
