How improving page load speed can increase your website traffic and user experience

This article is not something related to our usual electronics technology, rather we are dealing a little with web technologies and Internet marketing stuff. I know many of you electronics geeks and enthusiasts may not be well aware of technologies behind websites and techniques used to bring loads of traffic to a website. I will speak a little about these interesting stuffs in this article.

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You all know CircuitsToday is a very popular electronics website providing basic contents for students and hobbyists. In addition we write a little about technology news too, which are related to core electronics. We started this website way back in 2008 and has been growing slowly till today i.e 2011. We have 10000+ Email subscribers, nearly 5000 Facebook followers and we serve to nearly 10000 unique visitors every day.

Have you ever thought how it is possible to manage such a good volume of traffic to a website? Or have you ever thought how such a volume of traffic is achieved by any website?

To start a website any one first needs a fast web hosting account, a server space where your websites files and scripts are stored,processed and rendered to any user in this world. There are basically 3 types of hosting? environments? 1) Shared hosting 2) Virtual private servers 3) Dedicated servers. Following the links appended you can know more about these different hosting environments. The basic difference between these 3 hosting environments are in system capabilities and performance. A dedicated server has a complete system resource dedicated for a website (not shared with any other website). Resources of that computer/server are completely used to make performance of this website better and even better. For an example: Load Google.com in your web browser – how fast it is? It loads within fractions of a second. Now load another website say TechCrunch.com in your browser – what you see? It may load within 3 seconds. Now load our website CircuitsToday and count the time – it may take upto 4 or 5 seconds depending on your internet connection. Difference is TechCrunch runs on a Dedicated server where as CircuitsToday runs on an average Virtual Private Server. A dedicated server will cost around 200+ US Dollar and more every month and a Virtual Private Server costs nearly 80 US Dollar per month or even higher (Depending upon the resources we select). A shared hosting is an environment where lots of websites (say 30 to 50 for the sake of numbers) share a single system resource. So by now you can easily expect performance of a website hosted in shared environment will be way behind the one in Virtual or Dedicated servers.

Recently (2 days) before we upgraded CircuitsToday to an even higher level of VPS (Virtual Private Server). We are now running on a Level 4 VPS. We have done this to meet demands of ever growing traffic and to improve our user experience. I hope you have already felt this improved speed while browsing through CircuitsToday. We hope one day we will be able to deliver you from a Dedicated server.Let’s wait for that!

Apart from a hosting account you need to know HTML ,CSS and should have knowledge with programming languages like Php or Asp to start a website like this. CircuitsToday uses a Content Management System named WordPress to run our website and to render the various articles. If you dont have skills in Web technologies you can always learn it using websites like W3Schools . If you dont have time to learn or you are not interested to learn these stuffs, you can still make websites with the help of Freelance webdesigners or Web designing companies. You need to pay them for sure!

Now that we know a little about building websites, lets talk a little about how to brig traffic to a website. According to me, life of a website depends on it’s users. Users are the bread and butter of any website in this world. Without users how ever technologically advanced a website may be, it’s not even worth a penny! Why users come and visit a website? May be because they find it really useful for them. So “usefulness” is the key to web traffic – I mean the basic key. If you want traffic to your website, you have to keep it really useful. This means you have to supply really useful,informative,research and analysis type content using all medias – text, graphics and videos – which can benefit your users. This is the basic philosophy any website should follow.

Now to bring traffic there are many other techniques used like Search Engine Optimisation (aka SEO), Link Building, Banner advertising, Pay per click advertising, E-mail marketing, Social media marketing etc. Of all these Search Engine Optimisation is one of the most sought after method. In simple terms it is the process of ranking higher in search engines like Google and Bing for relevant search phrases (aka Keywords) of a website.

For example: CircuitsToday ranks high in Google for some keywords like 150 Watt Amplifier circuit , Water level indicator etc. Similarly traffic is delivered to CircuitsToday via 72000+ keywords every month.  Link building, Banner advertising, Pay per click advertising etc are more advanced methods of Internet marketing which involves marketing budgets and associated costs. Social media marketing is the effective use of Facebook. Twitter, Youtube etc.

CircuitsToday solely depend on SEO, Social Media and E-mail marketing for bringing traffic to the website.  Even though this sound simple, there’s a complex procedure involved in executing SEO and other Internet marketing methods.