Quicker page load speeds mean
Improved usability of your site
Which in turn means
- improved conversions
- higher search engine rankings
- reduced costs & increased performance for Google advertising
What affects page speed
- The capacity of the server where your site is hosted
- Optimised code and ‘good practice’ behind the scenes
- Images no larger than they need to be
- Caching page content
What is caching page content?
It is likely that your website’s pages are made up of dynamic content with some elements stored in a database. When a web page is called for by an end user’s browser the server draws content from HTML files, a database and from image folders to build the page with the latest information. This takes an amount of time.
To speed the process up many website servers build your page in advance and store it [in the cache] ready to deliver to your end-user on request.
If you updated your website after the server built your ready-made page, then unfortunately your updates will be saved in your database but not immediately shown.
Our server refreshes its own cache every 12 hours, and I can manually update it here too.
Your Internet Service Provider may also cache page content so they can deliver to you web pages that you regularly visit, quickly. This accounts for why users on different networks sometimes see page updates at different times.
