Google research confirms that a Website looses 20% of its visitors for every 0.5 second a page takes to load.

In fact, Google believes page load speed is so important to Website Users that it rewards fast Websites in its search algorithm. If everything else is equal, fast sites appear higher in the search engine rankings than slower ones.

We not only believe each page on a Website should load as fast as possible, but we even apply the logic to processes such as downloads, registrations, form fills and E-commerce checkouts.

Here is a taste of our Performance Optimisation logic:

Website Planning

Poor planning will always lead to duplicated resource hungry elements, so designing a complete site as a Wireframe or Prototype before development starts enables us to see the big picture from the off.

We can use this to plan semantic code, CSS stylesheets, classes and ID’s. In plain English, we can streamline the whole development process for maximum efficiency.

Clean Code, xHTML, CSS and Images

Performance tests highlight the need for clean code. Here are four simple factors overlooked on many Web Design projects, and their corresponding influence on page load speed:

• Not saving images effectively for web: + 28% page load time
• Using @import to call one half of a stylesheet into the other half: +7.6%
• Using inefficient CSS selectors: +5.5%
• Adding 10kb of extra HTML: +4.8%
• All of this adds up to lower Google rankings and a reduction in User satisfaction.

Database Optimisation

Drupal and Magento are powerful solutions driven by a lot of database code. We thrive on cleaning up unused code on every project, making sure when a Website User clicks on your Web page, the code needed to make things happen is reached in the fastest possible time.

Hosting

It goes without saying that if your Website is hosting on a budget server along with three or four hundred other sites, the first problem will be the decrease in the speed at which the server can “serve” your Website pages.

mwa Digital is proud to partner UK Fast, the UK’s most accredited, award-winning server solution provider.

We run our own dedicated high-performance Linux servers, all backed by the most comprehensive SLA (Service Level Agreement) in the business.

Our clients rest assured, that their Web sites are hosted on a server solution that is performance optimised specifically for Magento and Drupal deployments. This forms part of our Hosting Support promise.

Webcelerator™

Webcelerator is a speed improvement technology exclusively to UK Fast. The technology sits in front of the hosting server providing the following benefits:

• Typically accelerates over 90% of your Website.
• Helps protect against traffic spikes resulting from online marketing and traffic driving initiatives.
• Increases performance by reducing the load on the hosting server.
• Acclaimed by Virgin, Funky Pigeon and Easyphone.

Processes

We focus on the speed it takes Website Users to complete tasks and make sure that any action can be carried out in the least possible time.

This reduces stress, frustration and abandonment, whilst increasing customer satisfaction.

Every area of a Website is taken into consideration:

• Form fills take half the time and 50% of the cognitive load to complete because we put the field titles above the fields and not to the left.
• E-commerce checkout abandonment rates are slashed using our Xpress Checkout for Drupal and Magento Development.

Everything is geared around reducing the time it takes Website visitors to think and act.