We are all obsessed with speed. Just today the elevator in my building got me thinking how often we get nervous with the slightest changes in our every day routines.

It usually takes the elevator around 12-15 seconds to get me up to the 4th floor. All of a sudden, the elevator door began malfunctioning, and as a result it now takes me 15 seconds to get to the 4th floor, and another 5 for the door to open. After a couple of days I began to think that the stairs are not such a bad option. Now, imagine that this is your website. People are used to getting the information they need when they need it. When your site gets slower and it takes 10-20 second for a page to load, people tend to get nervous and find an alternative route to get what they want.

Access time is probably one of the most important factors for a site. You might have great content and services, but if you are not able to present it in a timely fashion, you are just throwing your hard work away. There are various ways and good practices to make your site run faster. A good starting point would be to go through these Usability Guidelines. These guidelines are particularly useful if you like to give your audience better experience while on your site. It is also quite important for search engines. Since April 2010 Google officially considers speed a major factor, and it was about time. People should have the content they want, when they want it.

Google keeps track of your site’s performance, and tries to give you a rough idea on your site’s speed. It gets updated every 2 weeks or so. You can check the speed at which your site delivers content as often as every 5 minutes with our website monitoring service. If you still haven’t tried it, we are curious to know what you think about our free trial.