I wanted to investigate the typical experience of a Cameroonian Internet user while visiting the websites of the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs). I figured that the time and energy a company puts into optimising their website for slow connections might indicate how focused they are as a company on their customers. After all, if ISPs know what bandwidth they are giving their customers then surely they will have optimised their sites to work well on those connections?

In addition I hope that this post will highlight the fact that you must optimise your site for low bandwidth users, especially if you operate in countries with poor Internet connectivity. In fact it's not too hard to do these days if you take a few simple steps, but first you need to be aware of the issue.

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Google says that they use the performance of your website as part of your search ranking:

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

Here are more good reasons why speed matters:

Speed is among the most significant success factors web sites face. In fact, your site's speed directly affects your income (revenue) — it's a fact. Some high traffic sites conducted research and uncovered the following:

• Google.com: +500 ms (speed decrease) -> -20% traffic loss [1]
• Yahoo.com: +400 ms (speed decrease) -> -5-9% full-page traffic loss(visitor left before the page finished loading) [2]
• Amazon.com: +100 ms (speed decrease) -> -1% sales loss [1]

A thousandth of a second is not a long time, yet the impact is quite significant. Even if you're not a large company (or just hope to become one), a loss is still a loss.

So how do you speed up your WordPress website to get that extra edge in search rankings and give a better experience to your users? Well you install a caching plugin of course! However not all caching plugins are created equal. For years WP Super Cache has been my weapon of choice because it is simple to install, very fast and is being constantly developed and improved.

One thing always annoyed me though Read More...