• SEO
• Visitor functionality

In my view, it is the second that is the most important.  Speed is now a factor for Google but it is a small element unless your site is really bad and very slow compared to your competitors.  The most important factor does your site “work” for a visitor.  If they click on a video does it start playing quickly, do the images and pages or posts articles load quickly.  Are they readable etc?

A CMS (Content Management System) like Word Press has more to do to display a page than one created in pure HTML.  There are database queries taking place etc.  Therefore a host that has servers optimised for CMS or even better for WordPress in particular, is likely to provide a  better and faster environment.

As this site and all of the Ticketyboo sites are developed in Word Press. I will concentrate on some of the speed factors and steps you should take to test and optimise a Word Press sites.

Image sizes

The first step you should take –  this applies to all websites on any server is to optimise the images.  Ensure that your images are optimised and compressed using a service Kraken.io.  At the bottom of this page, you will find more information and a video demo of the free web service from Kraken.  If the space on your web page is eg 600 X 450 pixels do not use an image that is 1200px wide.  Resize it so it is a little larger than the space it occupies then optimise the image using a service like Kraken.  It is often possible to build this into a Ticketyboo website so that the image is optimised automatically when uploaded.

Server speed.

If you are using WordPress choose a host that is focused on WordPress and offers PHP 7 (it is between 30 and 50% faster than PHP 5).   If you have more than a few images and videos you should use a CDN (Content Delivery Network).  All Ticketyboo sites will use PHP7 and are hosted on a server Network that specialises in Word Press.  All Ticketyboo website come with an SSL certificate and come already configured on a Content Delivery Network) CDN.  To start with we recommend Amazon’s CloudFlare S3 as it free for a year then is a Pay as you go service.

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver pages and other Web content to a user, based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and the content delivery server.

Please read our FAQ for more information on what is included in a Ticketyboo web site.