how much cyber patience do you have?

Online, it’s another story! I have no “cyber patience”! I’m not talking about people taking a long time to answer email (although I don’t like that very much either). I’m talking about wanting to smash your computer because of slow loading websites.

Have you ever been on these websites that look promising but you never bothered going to more than a page because while the home page loaded, you fell asleep due to long loading time…You already have more cyber patience than I do.

When I do a search on Google, I always “control click” the result. It has the effect of opening the result in a new tab. If the site takes more than 5 seconds to load, I have already closed the tab and opened the next result. I told you: No cyber patience whatsoever.

I bet most of you are like me: you hate slow loading websites. But where could it come from and how can I fix my site to be faster?

• REASON: Their internet connection is slow. SOLUTION: sorry, there is nothing you can do as a webmaster to speed up your site because it comes from the end user.  FOR THE USER: Give up dial-up or get their internet line checked! Protect your wifi with a tough password as well (somebody might be cruising along) otherwise websites will always be slow to load.
• REASON: The computer is slow. SOLUTION: Again, not much you can do about that. FOR THE USER: If after checking the connection speed on multiple websites, everything looks ok, then it probably comes from the computer. You may have to defragment your disk, buy more RAM, remove the viruses you have, free some disk space, check your configurations etc….call an IT person!
• REASON: Your website is slow :SOLUTION: Diagnose the problem and fix it. Let’s see below the different possibilities FOR THE USER: Just wait until the site is fixed. Just have a nap or use your cyber patience!

• Bad Web Hosting; Some hosts are terrible. We just switch one client from their windows server to our linux server and the loading time improve by 10 seconds!
• Unoptimized images: You have some pretty images on your site. People say hoooo, or haaa when they load your site….IF they manage to load your site. If your images are big and heavy, they could slow down your site terribly. You can optimize them by resizing them, cropping them, change the format to something more standard, reduce the quality a bit (it often doesn’t make much a difference) or use external CSS if it’s a background image.
• You are not compressing your web pages: You can send compressed version of your site to browsers using GZIP. It’s supported by most modern browsers (including mobile browsers). For example, we reduced the size of www.guaranteedseo.com by 76% using gzip compression!
• Too much Flash. Flash is nice. Flash is pretty. but Flash is not very clean code and can slow down your site quite a bit.
• Your code sucks! you don’t use external CSS and Javascript document, your use image spacers, tables, and write excessive amount of code…and yet you wonder why your site is slow to load?
• Your website could have a virus. Viruses are not only for computers (or humans), websites can catch them too.

There are tons of tools to check the speed of your site. You can check: http://code.google.com/speed, The Google Chrome Extension Speed Tracer, the YSlow Extension for Firebug. My favorite is: http://tools.pingdom.com/ where you can test the page speed, the DNS Health and Ping and Traceroute.

So if you are like me and have no cyber patience, either fix your computer, fix your internet connection, or fix your website loading time! It will improve your conversion, help your rankings and my cyber patience!!