Small business owners work every day to maximize the positive impact of their services, products, and customer relationships. They make sure that they have an effective and attractive website to draw in potential customers.
Yet there is one often-overlooked but critical factor when it comes to delivering a great website: site speed.
Site speed, simply put, is how quickly your website loads. When a user visits your website, how quickly will they see your content and be able to engage with it?
A site that loads quickly engages visitors immediately and draws them in, while a slower site can prove catastrophic for sales and other types of conversions.
Aberdeen Group, which performs research of technology companies and products, reports that a one-second delay in page load equates to 7% fewer conversions.
To remain competitive, it’s critical to deliver content as quickly as possible.
Optimizing Page Speed for Better Search Engine Rankings
Customer experience isn’t the only reason to make sure your site loads quickly. In 2010, Google announced that site speed would now factor into its search engine rankings.
While Google uses many factors to rank search results, such as relevance and incoming links, faster sites also receive a ranking bonus. Site speed has become more important than ever. For small business owners concerned about search engine optimization, maximizing site speed should form an essential part of the SEO strategy.
Google tests the speed of websites in a variety of ways, capturing information about how quickly the site loads in different countries and on different devices.
This becomes important when delivering content worldwide. Perhaps your website’s server is located in California, but a visitor in London accesses your site. Normally, the data must then be sent across the world to London, resulting in delays.
To remedy this problem, a Content Delivery Network, or CDN, can store pieces of content from your site in a location nearer to your potential customer. These CDNs can speed up your site for visitors across the country and the world, resulting in faster page loads and higher search engine rankings.
Luckily, there is a simple and streamlined solution that provides the speed boost that comes from a worldwide CDN as well as a host of other speed-enhancing features. CloudFlare accelerates websites, resulting in pages that load 2X as fast. Optimizing page speed is as simple as joining CloudFlare’s global community of accelerated, protected websites.
Benefits To Choosing CloudFlare To Maximize Your Site Speed
CloudFlare quickly and easily speeds up your site with just a simple change to your site’s DNS settings. With that change, traffic is routed through CloudFlare’s global data centers, where malicious visitors are screened out and page loading times are optimized.
CloudFlare’s next-generation Content Delivery Network stores your site’s static files closer to your visitors, resulting in faster sites and better SEO.
There is nothing to install, and the core services of CloudFlare are free. Beyond increasing your website’s speed across the globe, CloudFlare provides tools to help you understand your web traffic and keep your site secure.
CloudFlare provides in-depth analytics to give you information that other analytics programs ignore, including how much of your traffic is comprised of threats and search engine crawlers. This means faster, more reliable, and more secure websites for small business owners.
Thrive Can Help
Speed matters! So let the experts at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency handle the setup. We have extensive experience in the implementation of CloudFlare for our clients. Contact us online or call us at 817-642-9686.
