Is Your Website Loading Slow?

A managed dedicated server may not cost you as much as you think. Shared servers can be slowed as web site traffic grows. Whether it is your site or someone else's this effects load time of the web site page. A slow load time can be very detrimental to your sales.

The load time of your web site's pages can play a huge part in visitor retention on your site. Load time can be effected by many things such as page size, flash or splash intros, or a lot of slow loading graphics. These are areas your web master can evaluate for you. The cause can be the server and sharing it with others or the fact that your web site has increased traffic to the point it is slowing down the shared server by its self. A managed dedicated server is an answer if this is the case. The cost of a managed dedicated server may put you in sticker shock. You are probably paying less than $20/mo for shared server hosting and now you will be looking at $200/mo and up for a managed dedicated server. Looking at that increase in overhead could make you think slow loading isn't that bad. Think again!

Slow loading pages and visitor retention are inversely proportional. That is to say it is usually accepted within online marketing circles that a page load that takes over 8-10 seconds will result in a loss of over 1/3 of your sites visitors. Does that strike a nerve? That can mean a significant decrease in sales or customer communication. If the site is relevant to the business this could be very costly. Now add in the advertising budget and the portion of it that could be squandered by not retaining customers and you start to see the negative repercussions mounting up. Maybe $200/mo for a managed dedicated server isn't such a bad idea?

Another aspect to think of is that your site is slow now, if you speed it up you may see an increase in sales immediately. Over the month this could influence sales to where the additional expense of the managed dedicated server is negligible. It could even increase your profits.

The page load speed on your web site is worth monitoring. It can have a huge effect on your bottom line if your site is instrumental in your business. A managed dedicated server can make a world of difference. It may cost less than you think!