Cloud Content Caching and Image Hosting Reduces Page Load Times and Increases Conversions

This is a guest post by Tyrone Brown my ecommerce and blogging friends will want to pay special attention to because it offers a strategy for speeding up page load times for your blog or online store by using Image Hosting and Content Caching.

I have been trying out cloud edge services recently to see which one works best for my site. To give you an overview, my site is a blog/forum that caters to British, Australian, and New Zealand readers. I sell automotive products through Commission Junction and my site is aimed at automotive enthusiasts.

The blog section covers advanced automotive topics for people who modify and repair their own cars, so many of them are mechanics – especially younger mechanics. They also are heavily weighted toward a few car manufacturers, such as BMW’s.

Image Hosting Content Caching

The service I use now is Cloudcache and it has been very successful. It helped me in many areas of my site so now I make more money than I did before:

More Conversions Due to Faster Load Speeds

The main purpose of a content delivery network (CDN) is to make your site load faster. This is because most potential leads are lost within the first eight seconds of landing on a page. In other words, people do not like to wait around a lot or else they will go back to the search results page.

With mobile web becoming ubiquitous, this is more of a problem since mobile devices like iPads and smartphones do not have very fast connections. So, if the user has a slow connection and a server-side slow-down is added on top of the client-side slowness, then the potential customer is a lot more likely to bounce off your site than if you use Cloudcache.

Speeding Up Page Load Times

This happened to me a lot before I used Cloudcache since there are many pictures on my site (mechanics like to post pictures of engines) and I hosted them all locally. However, I have since moved my rich content to Cloudcache and the whole site loads a lot more quickly since the images, videos, and other large files come from a supercharged CDN.

Improved Search Engine Rankings

Search engines like Google favor sites that are fast to load so if your site loads faster then it will show up higher on search engine results. Before I used Cloudcache, my three main landing pages ranked #7, #9, and #11 on Google. However, after I started using Cloudcache, they jumped to #4, #7, and #8, and usually stay around there.

Also, Google does not count remotely hosted files against what it sees as your load time, so by putting your large files on Cloudcache you are in effect hiding them from Google’s load time calculator without taking away the SEO benefits of having video and images on your site.

Security with an SSL

Cloudcache’s biggest selling point, though, is its SSL services, and these have been really useful for me. Since I generate automotive leads through a newsletter, I want to make sure that the leads’ information is safe.

For one thing, I really value my readers, but also, nobody would go to my site if they started getting junk mail. And spammers could easily steal this information from me if I did not have the SSL I get from Cloudcache.

Tagged as: cloud hosting, content caching, content curation, image hosting, increasing conversions