i can say with confidence its true, after i moved to my new host last month my ctr went from 8% to 13% and has remained so since.
You can test it yourself if you're serving php enabled webpages. Add a timer to measure load time for each visitor and record it $time_start = microtime(true); // entire page $time_end = microtime(true); $time = $time_end - $time_start; Code (markup):
These are the real speed factors. If your server is slowing you down, you should change hosts. There is no excuse for slow servers anymore.
how did you test this? you guys can check out this link to find out your site speed: http://www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php i did and mine's load time is 0.37 seconds.
That's true when you say there is no excuse for slow servers. But some people sometimes think their server is slow and rubbish when in fact it is there site's script optimization. In other words they have none. You will be surprised on how much quicker you can make a site load if you optimize it for speed. I have done alot with my sites. I use alot of caching techniques, database query optimization. Some of my pages took about 20 times as long or more to load before I had started doing all this optimization for my site which I learn't to do about 2 years ago. Even though it is good to have a fast server, optimizing your scripts for speed is very good. The faster your site the better. That is another reason why people use Google, is because it is fast.
I totally agree with this caching techniques. I have a site where each query takes around 5 seconds. But I just cache the result of the query and serve it next time because my database is static and not updating every now and then, it makes my page come up within half a second.
1. I had hosting with a shared hosting company. (dual 2.8 xeon) 2. Then I purchased a dedicated server. (p4 2.8) 3. I synced the site. 4. I split tested. I can't tell you the exact results. But it was around a 8-10% jump in revenue. So it was well worth it. It's been the same ever since. I can't guarentee the same results for everyone else, tho.
The tests I done using the SEOself tool. I thought that I would give it a try and I had the following results for the main pages of my site: _________________________ # | Domain name | Size | Load time (secs) | Average Speed per KB 01 articles.simplysearch4it.com 25.26 KB 0.34 seconds 0.01 seconds 02 products.simplysearch4it.com 30.7 KB 0.34 seconds 0.01 seconds 03 simplysearch4it.com 17.42 KB 0.38 seconds 0.02 seconds 04 games.simplysearch4it.com 30.89 KB 0.32 seconds 0.01 seconds 05 webdir.simplysearch4it.com 22.7 KB 0.28 seconds 0.01 seconds ________________________ Is these results good or bad?
O M F G !! Ok.. yesterday was my best sunday in a month, for both earnings and traffic Today (first Monday since the server upgrade) - My traffic is the highest it's been EVER (well, not counting the week i was on Digg.com), and earnings are higher than they've been in months! And the day isnt even over yet! I am AMAZED at what a difference the faster server has made! Here's a recap of what i had/did: Site has been getting around 5,000-6,000 uniques per day Site has been hosted on a low-price ($8/month) shared-host Recently during peak hours, page-load times were very poor - 10-45 seconds in some cases Upgraded to a managed dedicated super-server ($175/month) - got everything working on Sunday I cant get a page to load any slower than 2 seconds.. usually faster So far over today over 7,000 uniques (Analytics is only up to 7pm..5 more hours to go!), with the biggest increase from search engines CTR is DOUBLE today what it was for the average of last month.. some pages CTR is frighteningly high. Earnings are on-track to break my all-time high for one day ($150) I've pissed myself with excitement..
Man , who's your host ? Post it here with an affiliate link (you do deserve the credit), and I am pretty sure I'll sign up . Probably won't be the only one
I upgraded my shared hosting to dedicated hosting aswell, but the results were bad: Shared server: - fast load times, but in peak hours 503 errors (Sometimes you needed to refresh 10 times) - 3,95 a month (godaddy) - 60K uniques a day - nice earnings (untill smartpricing...) Dedicated Server - a 1 month dedicated server at godaddy (88 dollar) - Fast loading times untill the evening (the usa visitors awake) loading times up to a minute and sometimes won't load at all (visitors begging for old server...) - decreasement in visitors - had to ask a friend to speed it up a little bit (Godaddy said: we only give you a dedicated hosting, you must set it up, we won't help you with that) - lowered earnings - Nightmares But ok, that's just godaddy, i will soon go for another hosting company. And i hope that my site didn't lost all his visitors after i moved the database, files and domain name (again)...
Well, they are good for "lower traffic" sites, like 10,000 visitors a day. (atleast, with those statics i didn't had problems) Anyways, that site is just 32 days old, and i started at godaddy because there were cheap and i didn't knew if the site would become a succes, but after 20 days i saw that it was a succes, then i boughd a dediserver at godaddy because i would get one billing from one company instead of manny smaller ones from different hosting company's.
I've always found the faster the page loads, the better retention rate for viewers meaning not only do they stay around longer that visit, but they are more likely to keep coming back as well. Makes sense and I'm interested to see more results, thank you for this experiment.