Will our new website be faster than our old website?

One of the bugbears with your current website – I’m guessing – is its performance. Particularly on mobile – often image heavy sites with plenty of great looking video and animations are particularly sluggish on mobile. So, it’s something we get asked a lot: will our new website be faster than our old one? I’ve got 2 minutes worth of thoughts for you …

Below is a transcription of the video for those who prefer to read rather than watch!

So will the website we build for you be faster than your current website? Going to get this done in two minutes?

Hopefully. And, should be, and also: it depends. So the most common factors that we see that contribute to poor performance and website would be improperly formatted and sized imagery and an inefficient caching process.

Let me just run through those real quick. Poor hosting. We work exclusively with a managed WordPress hosting service called WP Engine. They’re really good. They have state-of-the-art, blah, blah, blah. But they are reliable and they are fast, and they’re a bit more expensive than a lot of other providers, but they are just really good at what they do. It’s all they do, and they’re brilliant at it. So no more to be said. That’s super helpful with improving the performance of your website.

Secondly, oh my goodness, the number of huge PNG files I see on websites that if they were properly sized and not PNGs, but JPEGs (slightly better), or WEBP files for preference, makes a huge difference to the performance of your site.

So we’d go through all your images, make sure that they’re properly sized, properly formatted, and guarantee that that will boost your site performance.

Thirdly, a proper caching setup. So we work with WordPress and we work with Statamic, and in both of those cases we have excellent setups for caching. That means that a new visitor comes to your website … they (their browser) doesn’t have to query the database, they don’t have to pull in new information all the time. They’re served a static resource, which loads so much faster and just improves performance of your site.

So the short answer is, yeah, probably. It will probably be considerably faster than your current site, but it does depend obviously on how fast your current site is and the tech stack you’re currently using. Thanks.