This morning, an
interesting article appeared on BBC's most read stories which
summarised some findings of how a fast website helps businesses to
increase sales – and how a slow one is bad. And what is good for a
business is usually good for their customers too. Undoubtedly, you
will also prefer a fast loading page over one that allows you to go
for a cup of tea while waiting for the images to load.
While we do not want
to endorse the trend of ever-increasing speeds and superlatives in
every facet of life – after all it is nice to simply enjoy the
moment every now and then without rushing through the day – there
is also nothing wrong to speed things up on the technological side.
Take your time to explore our site. But it should be time spent
looking and browsing, not waiting for pages slowly appearing block by
block. And that's our job here: Provide you with a fast website while
not neglecting good product images and an overall pleasant visual
appearance and functionality.
Now, what is JAREEYA
doing to provide you with a great online experience?
The main factor is
that our website is entirely built in-house, with only the absolute
minimum of external plug-ins. Not only saves this a lot of costs
associated with tasking this to an experienced website developer, but
it also means we know our website in and out. Something needs
changing? Something wrong? No problem, any updates and fixes are
quickly made. We also refrain from pre-built websites or website
building tools: The generated code is cluttered with junk which
causes unnecessary delays and potentially decreased functionality.
To make sure you get
a fast and responsive site, we test pages with tools like google's
pagespeed and others. This gives useful insights as to what
components of a website cause delays. Obviously, a website's speed
also depends on where it is physically hosted and from where you try
to access it. The day this article was published, our website
www.jareeya.com managed a very fast load time of under 1 second from
a server in Sweden! This takes it into the category of the fastest
websites around and the speeds within the UK should be even higher
(our website is hosted on a server in London). However, the actual
speed depends on your own internet connection and may be slower than
1 second.
We streamlined our
checkout process: You can see what is in your cart, make any changes
to it and then go through the normal steps of checkout all on the
same page! If you pay with debit or credit card, the entire checkout
is done on the same page as your basket and shaves off seconds of the
payment process (after all, paying is not the most exciting moment
during your visit, so let's keep this quick and simple – while
maintaining high security standards). But you do not need to worry
that you click the wrong button and accidentally pay for something
you do not like: The checkout process is hidden until you are ready
to go through it.
Did you know that
two pictures that look identical are not necessarily the same? Photos
you shoot with your digital cameras include so called meta-data: Data
that saves further details about the image, for example date and time
photo taken, exposure length, user information, etc. These is extra
data that would be loaded by the webserver but is of no use to the
viewer. The same picture can also be represented by different file
formats, each having its own particular benefits and drawbacks.
Images on JAREEYA's website strip out redundant data, uses the best
file format for its purpose and compresses images for the best
balance of fast loading times and maintaining high quality.
Currently, JAREEYA's
website gets good results in google's pagespeed tool (not top grade,
but all in the “green” area). JAREEYA's in-house web-developer
managed to get sites reaching the 100 mark (out of 100), but for our
case we will need to settle on slightly lower scores: Just because
google tells you what is best and fastest does not translate into the
best solution for you as our customer. We still have some
improvements to do, even though our website is in a very good and
fast state already. Yet we continue to optimise and fine-tune – we
never settle with good being good enough and strive to bring you the
very best ;-)
Looking forward to
welcoming you to an even faster site,
Your JAREEYA-Team
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