Showit sites are fast

Google is most likely going to change their search algorithm to account for site loading times. In laments terms, if your site loads slowly then you will not rank well. Are you ready for that?  Want to find out if your site is loading slowly as compared to other sites?  Measure your site speed with Google Webmasters Site Performance Tool. This can be found in your Google Webmasters account (which you should be using for your Showit site anyway), under the “Labs” section and is listed as “Site Performance.” If you don’t already use Firebug then don’t worry about installing the plugin. That’s mainly for development and debugging purposes.

If you don’t have any data yet, don’t fret. Your site may have not been up for long enough to collect data. Also, don’t worry if it says your “average load time” is more than a few seconds. That is average, and is accumulative. What we’re looking at is the example load time from the / URL which is the first page of your site. It should be under 1 second. If it’s not then you may want to re-think what you have loading right off the bat.

Here is a screenshot from our site. It says our average loading time is 2.5 seconds, but that our site loads in 0.8 seconds. That is FAST for a flash site. It’s also interesting to check out our other sites, for example learnshowit.com has an average loading time of 0.8 seconds, which is faster than 93%of all sites. Pretty impressive for a Showit site. These figures also DO NOT account for the Rapid Hosting that Showit just released yesterday. With Rapid Hosting, there is no wait for your Showit site to load, as long as you don’t bog it down with 50mb videos, 5mb photos, and 8mb mp3s. Compress that junk down and save your visitors some time, and their sanity. We’re going to keep an eye on this as we just setup our site for Rapid Hosting. We’ll post back our findings after a few months of collecting more data.

*Update – Well that didn’t take long. After the above tests we’re run we flipped the switch to rapid edge hosting. Once that happened our load time was cut in half! Our Showit site now loads in 0.3 seconds, which is faster than 98% of all sites measured. See for yourself.