How to make your website fast
Have you ever struggled using a website builder or worried about how much it costs to maintain a simple website?
Do you know how often people visit your site? How long they stay and which pages they visit? Do you know how long it takes visitors to download your site, especially if it's their first visit?
If you want more people to visit your site then you have to know how your actual visitors experience it.
Speed is the most essential metric - the quicker it loads the more likely visitors will stay on your site.
A recent Google study found that 53% of mobile users abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to download. That's a terrible loss of opportunity.
The ideal website building platform should guarantee that the vast majority of first time site visitors are able to engage with the content within two seconds even from a mobile phone on a 4G connection.
The dropdown menu in the top right of this page tells you how long it took to download and what it cost in terms of how much data was transfered.
Maintaining your site
How do you add new content to your site? Do you pay someone to do it for you or are you confident using a website building tool?
We think most website editing tools are too complex for non-technical people. It takes a lot of time to master Wordpress, for example, and become familiar with its plugin ecosystem.
Surely the easiest way to build a website is to change it inline and have all your changes saved and reflected in what you see on the screen in front of you. What You See Is What You Get means no surprises when you publish your site.
The ideal platform should maintain a clear separation between what you build and what you publish - in other words you need two websites. You change content exclusively in one until satisfied with how it looks before publishing the same content in your live site - the one you bought a domain for.
Simple editing
The ideal platform should include an intuitive editor application embedded within the website itself. If you're the site owner and have logged in then all you should ever need to do is click, change content and publish your site.
The editor needs to be fully functional, but not complex. Something that looks a bit like like Microsoft Word would be ideal where you can create headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, quotes, links and easily include images, videos and audio.
Design flexibility would be good too - like choosing different fonts for headings and text. There are almost two thousand fonts to choose from Google and they are all free. Being able to use any of these for your site would be great.
Search Engine Optimisation
The ideal platform should cover all of the SEO details for you automatically. Things like unique page titles are important and should be generated intelligently from your content.
No one knows for sure how Google ranks pages other than its algorithm highly rates authentic, informative content. No platform can help you there. AI content generators, by definition, are not authentic.
However, Google also ranks pages based on it's Core Web Vitals. These are measurements of visitors' experience using your site, including how long it took to engage with the content, how stable the content remains in the layout and how responsive the site is to button clicks for example.
The top right menu shows these metrics for your visit and if they are all green then Google will rate this site higher than oher sites with similar content but worse metrics.
My sister migrated her Wordpress site on to this platform and within 2 months was getting up to 50 first time visitors a day where previously she was lucky to get the same number of visitors in a month.
Easy Migration
The ideal platform should make it easy to copy content between pages. For example, it should allow you to copy / paste from say, a Wordpress site, to the new site using nothing more than Control-C and Control-V.
The essential thing here though is that the content must be represented in the new site with semantically correct HTML.
Accessible, inclusive
Accessibility has become a hot topic on the web and with good reason too. A depressingly large percentage of the population have disabilities that prevent them from accessing the content of most web sites. People with poor eyesight for example need to have the content read to them using assistive technologies, but these only work if the content is semantically correct.
Our editor guarantees that all content is structured in such a way that these assistive technologies are able to correctly interpret the contant and convey it to visitors with disabilities.
Making your content accessible is not only the right thing to do, it now becomes a legal requirement for public facing websites in many countries.
The ideal platform goes a long way towards meeting accessibility standards by ensuring that all content is semantically correct. For example, the navigation links at the top of the page are structured in such a way that these can be easily presented and understood by people who are unable to see the content.
Fast pages
The title of this page was about making pages download fast. If the page has something informative to say, then it needs to say it as fast as possible. No one wants to wait more than a couple of seconds to see whether the link they clicked on in Google has the right answers.
The ideal website building platform, therefore, has to guarantee that pages are downloaded to first time visitors within that attention threshold.
Of course, no platform can absolutely guarantee that because mobile networks in particular can be unreliable depending on the location. However, at the 90th percentile we should aim to have pages download within two seconds, even on mobile.
Open this page on your mobile phone and check the download speed for yourself. Even on an old android phone connected to a 4G network it should still be within the threshold. Indeed, this platform was tested almost exclusively on a 10 years' old Android phone on the basis that if it performs well there it will perform well anywhere.
The most satisfaction we had developing this platform was seeing a first time visit of 3.5 seconds from someone in Africa on a 3G network connected at 1.5 mbs. Not within the threshold, maybe, but orders of magnitude quicker than anything you could expect from pages built using popular website builders.
Real User Monitoring
You can only improve your content if you know how your visitors experience it. The ideal platform should allow the site owner to access all visit data whenever they want with minimal overhead.
Most website builders will let Google do this by including their javascript tag manager in your pages. But it's almost illegal to force your first time visitors to download over 100KB of javascript when they haven't asked for it.
There's also the issue of privacy. Not everyone wants Google to surreptitiosly capture their IP address and device details in order to feed their advertising business.
It's the same privacy issue for fonts. If your site references the Google font library then your visitors are unwittingly allowing Google to capture these details about where they are and what device they are using. Indeed, there was recently a legal judgment on this issue in Germany.
For these reasons, the ideal platform doesn't link to Google libraries. Instead of 100K of javascript, we send 5K that captures details that are relevent only to improving the user's experience.
In this way, site owners can see how their pages perform, which pages are popular, how long users engaged with their content, the order in which pages were viewed in a session, how many visitors are first time etc. That's basically all you get from Google but without the inconvenience of learning how to do it.
The key takeaway here is that the ideal website builder should create pages focused entirely on the visitor's experience and in no way influenced by a developer's predilection for using some convenient plugin or worse, a framework.
Lock in
Site owners can download all of the components of their site any time they want. That means all of the HTML, CSS, Fonts, Content Security Policy, Media references and Javascript are sent to their browser's download folder on request.
You could use this actually if you just want to self host optimised Google fonts on some other platform. Just copy your content into the builder, click the "Publish Editor Site" button and then click "Download Site".
The downloaded zip file will include your chosen fonts including only the distinct set of characters used in your content. For example, this website uses about 70 distinct characters of the Google ASAP font - in the dropdown top right you will see that it weighs about 20K instead of 150K for the full font file.
But before you do that...