How Fast Should a Website Load?

By Simon  |  28 Jun 2018 09:00:00

When someone visits your website, you need the landing page to load as quickly as possible. If visitors have to wait for the page to appear you will lose some of those visitors.

At Sellr, we spend a lot of time analysing website performance and making sure that the entire system is working as fast as possible.

Google says that you must aim for a page load speed of less than 2 seconds. In fact Google uses page load speed as a ranking signal - meaning that if your page loads quickly then it will make it more likely that you'll appear higher up in search results.

Our view is that ecommerce is the most important type of website to load quickly seeing as you might lose a sale if the page takes too long to load.

So how fast do Sellr pages load?

Up until a couple of weeks ago we were averaging at around 0.42 seconds for a page load. (Note that that's not first byte, thats for the page to be completely loaded). That's really fast and we've been very happy with those results. However, as part of a project to further enhance the system, we realised there were other things we could do to further speed up page loads. We implemented those on the 20th and 21st June and you can see the results in the graph below.

You can see that the page load speed went from being around 0.42 seconds, to an incredible 0.24 seconds. That's under a quarter of a second!

That's an incredible load speed that would be very hard to beat.

If you're currently not using Sellr and you've noticed that your website is slow, then you will almost definitely be losing sales, possibly in significant numbers. Many companies pile hundreds of even thousands of websites onto a single webserver and everyone suffers when one of the websites gets a lot of traffic. Sellr simply doesn't work like that. We have multiple load balanced servers and database servers sharing traffic between them. With the addition of Cloudflare this ensures that the system is ultra reliable and super fast.