Architected for Speed

Learn how a fast website can make the difference between a visitor converting or leaving your site frustrated.

By Ryan Thrash  |  Updated: September 9, 2020  |  2 min read
Architected for Speed

Improve search rank, revenues and visitor engagement with a fast website

A fast website will keep your visitors around longer—increased engagement. The faster you can serve them, the better your site will perform, and it very well could have serious bottom-line impacts. Case in point: Google itself tested search results pages with 30 results vs only the 10 they show today. The load time difference was not that much greater between the two—Google has really fast servers and highly optimized markup—but the traffic results were astouding:

Traffic dropped 20% on the longer, slower pages. What's more astounding is how seemingly insignificant the page load time was between 10 and 30 results: 0.5 second. A mere half of a second cost Google 20% of their traffic. Anecdotally, those pages were already pretty fast: .4 seconds vs .9 seconds. Other anecdotes tie very real dollars to faster pageload times. Walmart famously found that for every 1 second of improvment on their pageload times, with no other changes, they increased conversion by 2%. For every 100ms (that's 1/10 of a second!), incremental revenue increased 1%. The moral of the story is simple. Go fast, or get left behind.

Why your CMS matters, and it should be MODX Revolution

MODX Revolution was architected by default for speed. In fact, it ships with a robust caching engine—WordPress does not—that helps avoid hitting the database. If you have a site that's reasonably well built (i.e., it uses cachable Snippet calls), then it should outperform page load times compared to most other alternatives. Speed shouldn't be an afterthought, or require massively overbuilt servers to achieve it. MODX Revolution was designed with speed and mind, and can perform surprisingly well even on modestly configured servers.

Benefits for Organizations

  • Outperform the competition in search with a faster site
  • Increase visitor engagement and time on site by serving pages to visitors fast
  • Additional options for advanced caching and scaling like memcached

For End Users & Site Builders

  • Build a fast site without calling in ubernerds to help
  • Look like a hero to your boss for having a fast site that converts