It does not have to be difficult or time-consuming to speed up a website. In this blog post, I will explain the importance of web hosting for your website’s page speed, as well as what we at Templ have done to increase the speed of our customers’ websites by an average of more than 200%.
How important is the page speed?
It is not only the conversion rate that increases with reduced loading time, but also other behaviors are affected, such as how long the visitor stays on the website, and how many return to it. In the end, it is the brand that is harmed if the website is slow.
Several large companies have analyzed the impact of speed:
- For Amazon, a tenth of a second of extra loading time resulted in a reduction in sales of 1%. (Gigaspaces.com)
- Pinterest conducted a study in 2015, which showed that the conversion on their mobile website increased by 40% as loading time decreased by 60%. (Pinterest Engineering)
- Google determined that half a second of extra loading time resulted in 20% less traffic. (Gigaspaces.com)
Several comprehensive studies, which include a large volume of websites, demonstrate the importance of speed:
- 47% of all visitors expect the website to load in two seconds or less. (Neilpatel.com)
- 46% of all visitors do not return to websites that load slowly. (Exai.com)
- 70% of all consumers state that loading time affect their willingness to shop from an online store. (Searchenginejournal.com)
- 88% of all internet users choose webshops that are high-performing and fast. (Sweor.com)
At Templ, we have discovered that almost all websites have unattainable potential when it comes to speed, and often it is the web hosting that is the reason why it is slow.
Why are web hosts slow?
The most common reason that websites load more slowly before moving to Templ, is that the former web hosting service offers so-called “Shared Hosting”. This means that the website is placed on a physical server with resources shared by many websites. In addition to risking the website’s security and uptime, it also has a negative effect on page speed. Such a web host is also rarely optimized for WordPress, and cannot usually offer the features required for a really fast website.
Templ offers so-called Managed WordPress Hosting, which in many ways differs from traditional Shared hosting.
How Managed WordPress Hosting affects your page speed
The concept of Managed WordPress Hosting has, unfortunately, become a bit watered down in recent times. Today, many web hosts boast that they specialize in WordPress, while offering hosting for other platforms as well. Managed WordPress Hosting requires a focus on only WordPress, and that the web host is built and has adapted its service completely for the platform.
Factors that enable faster websites on web hosts that offer Managed WordPress Hosting are:
The latest technology – – Does the web host use Nginx/Litespeed, MariaDB, server-based cache, CDN, HTTP3/Quic, latest version of PHP?
Dedicated resources – With dedicated resources the website does not risk loading slowly due to congestion of other websites on the same web host. If the resources are exceeded, they will usually be temporarily scaled up and you will be notified with a recommendation to upgrade your plan so that your load time is not negatively affected.
High-performance cloud servers – Instead of the website being placed on a physical server in a dusty basement, modern web hosts often use cloud servers from e.g. Google and Amazon. When websites are placed on the Google Cloud Platform, they enjoy the same technology that Google itself uses for services such as Gmail and Google search.
Is Templ faster than other web hosts that offer Managed WordPress hosting?
What mainly differentiates Templ from other web hosts, in addition to the previously mentioned factors, is speed optimization – which is adapted to the website and is performed by hand. This means that Templ can speed up websites additionally after migrating them from previous web hosts.
Here are examples of actions Templ is taking to speed up customers’ websites:
WordPress Configuration – Optimal configuration of WordPress
Review of plugins – Identifiy and replace black listed plugins
Database Optimization – Replace olde database format with newer ones
Troubleshooting – Scan site for serious errors
Server Log – Scan the server logs for issues
Image Optimization – Reduce the file size of images
Activate and optimize cache – Check cache and optimize for website
Thanks to the optimization service, we’re proud to say that all websites that have moved to Templ have reduced their loading times. Here are some examples.
Sixtydays.com
The Scandinavian fashion brand Sixtydays, which previously used shared hosting, reduced its loading time from 5.9 seconds to 1.6 seconds, by moving its website to Templ.
When examining the speed of a website, people often talk about TTFB. This means “Time to first byte” and measures as the name suggests the time it takes for the first bytes on the website to reach the visitor’s browser. TTFB is thus a measure of the web server’s responsiveness, which is of course clearly affected by the web host. Sixtyday’s TTFB went from 3.4 to 0.6 seconds after migrating to Templ.
Lotusproshop.se
Lotusproshop sells beauty products and improved their page speed by 211% – from 5.6 seconds to 1.8 seconds – after moving to Templ
Bjork-magnusson.se
The loading time on the traditional food wholesaler Björk-Magnusson’s website went from 18 seconds (!) to just over 1 second after migrating to Templ.
Theupskillcompany.se
The Upskill Company is an innovative company in competence supply. The company’s website was already loading relatively fast at its previous web host, but after moving to Templ, the loading time was cut in half.
TTFB was decreased from 1 second to a remarkable 0.06 seconds.
Flowersforfriday.se
Just as the name implies, Flowers for Friday delivers flowers every Friday, to those who want to spruce up the home for the weekend. The webshop is an important part of the business and after moving to Templ, the loading time was reduced to 0.7 seconds from the previous 3.08 seconds.
Average improvement
Using speed optimization, Templ has accelerated customers’ websites by an average of 202%. The average loading time before migration was 3.1 seconds, and has been reduced to 1 second on average.
The TTFB has improved by an average of 351% – from 1.9 seconds to 0.4 seconds.
The ratings on Google’s tools PageSpeed Insights have also improved, and the average rating on desktops has increased by 27% – from 61 to 77.6. On mobile, the same increase is 36% – from 29.8 to 40.7.
How fast can your website become?
Want to know more about the potential of your website, and how fast it can be? Contact us in the chat or register an account at https://templ.io/register/ – we will help you get started, and optimize your website free of charge.
* Templ has tested the home pages of the websites with the tool tools.pingdom.com. At this publication, 2021-01-13, the statistics have been based on 51 tests. The websites that have been tested and moved to Templ have previously used the services Cloudways, Siteground, A2 Hosting, Miss Hosting, and Linode, among others.
