Page load speed has recently become a game-changer. More has been discovered about the importance of site speed from a conversion point of view, but there's also big bonuses to be had in terms of SEO ranking now.

We recently became mildly obsessed with improving this aspect for our clients, knowing the potential benefits.

This is feedback we recieved on the subject from Adrian Higgins, Director of Atlantic Shopping:

"As owners of websites we always try to come up with the latest features and follow the newest trends within the market place, giving our potential customers and existing customers the best shopping experience we can.  Our sole intention is to gain that edge on our competition and increase our conversion rates…. and we are all happy to use our budgets to achieve this.

However as we add all these new wizzy features it can lead to an increase of download time. As part  our development programme we're delighted that you recommended we step back and take a slightly different approach to improve our site - you were dead right.

We collectively started to look at site speed and how we could improve it and hence give our customers the fastest shopping experience we could. This took the form of  a whole host of topics ranging from optimizing site images through  to  more technical  features such as  paralllise downloads across hostnames and leverage browser caching.The results were amazing and far out weighed our expectations, made possible due to the customisable features and infrastructure of Aurora.

The site speed nearly doubled and our orders increased by more than 10%. I must admit very few new site features manage to come even close to this and of course the icing on the cake is that it helps with SEO too – it’s a win win situation and one I would recommend to anyone that has a customisable system  like Aurora."