Your customers expect to see something beautiful when they visit your jewelry website. Typically this means they want to see pretty pictures, and lots of them.
Speed should be one of your biggest website concerns. By now you must have heard that a visitor will spend 11 seconds, or 7 seconds, or as few as 3 seconds evaluating your website before they decide to leave or keep going. It doesn't matter if it's 11 seconds or 3; the fact is there are very few seconds before someone decides to leave and leave forever.
Don't waste those first few seconds with a blank screen because your website is slow.
Here's the deal... The internet lines outside on your telephone pole run at the same speed all over the world. When you experience a slowdown on a website it's usually because of one of these reasons:
1. your computer is slowing down
2. your smartphone is having 3G connection issues
3. the website server is slow
4. you designed your website poorly
You have no control over items #1 and #2 in that list. , but #3 and #4 do have solutions that you can control.
Speeding up the hardware that runs your website might be as simple as calling your website host and asking them to move you to new equipment. If that's not possible then you would need to move your website to a new company. If you've had the same website or CMS for more than 3 years then this change, an upgrade should give you a night and day difference in your website speed.
Google will measure your website speed by how quickly it responds to Googlebot (the program Google uses to find and read websites) and to the speed measured using Google Toolbar. Google wants to see the fastest response rates for a website. Although speed testing is supposed to be a small concern for Google SERP, they do say that your website should be faster than your competitor's. Assuming the information on two local jewelry websites is similar, Google will rank the faster website higher in the SERP.
Solving issue #4 is more complicated and we're going to dedicate tomorrow's Daily Nugget to going over a few programming tips to speed up your website.
