⚡Loading time and performance

More important than it feels — because you always experience your own site as fast: your computer has it in its cache, your connection is good, and you know what you are waiting for.

Your visitors do not have that. A noticeable share come via the mobile network, often with weak reception.

What depends on it:

• Drop-offs. Anyone who sees nothing after a few seconds goes back to the results list and clicks on the next one.
• Search engines take loading time into account, especially for the mobile view.
• The impression. A slow site looks neglected, regardless of what is on it.

The benchmark is not “under two seconds” at any price. It is: it should not feel like waiting.

Because they make up almost the entire weight of a page. Text weighs kilobytes, an unedited mobile phone photo five to ten megabytes — a thousand times as much.

A page with eight such images takes noticeably long to load on a mobile phone, no matter how well everything else is done.

What Aurora Hive Sites does for you: uploaded images are reduced in size for delivery and delivered in an economical format. So you do not have to do the maths yourself.

What you should still do:

• No more images than necessary. Twelve gallery images instead of forty.
• Do not upload the same image several times in different crops.
• Crop before uploading if only part of it is needed.

These are three decisions while building, not three tasks afterwards.

In two ways, and both are necessary:

• Check it yourself, under real conditions. On a mobile phone, on the mobile network, not on Wi-Fi — and ideally out and about, not at your desk next to the router.
• A measuring tool that calls up the site from outside and gives a score. The score alone says little; the list of the biggest slowdowns underneath is the useful part.

What to look out for: what happens in the first two seconds? Can you already see something, or does the page stay white? A page that appears step by step feels faster than one that is finished all at once.

And measure the pages visitors actually open — usually the home page and the most important service page, not the legal notice.

In this order, by frequency:

1. Too many or too large images. By far the biggest item.
2. Embedded third-party content. A video, a map, a chat window — each pulls data from another server and waits for its response.
3. Analytics tools and consent banners. They often run before the actual content.
4. Very long pages. A home page with twenty sections loads everything at once.

What does not slow it down: the number of subpages, the amount of text, the number of blocks as such.

The practical conclusion: if your site is slow, look at the images first and then at what you have embedded. Everything else is rarely worth the effort.

Four things, in this order:

1. Thin out galleries. From forty images to the best twelve. It only costs decisions.
2. Check videos. Does the home page really need an embedded video, or is an image with a link to it enough?
3. Shorten the home page. Hardly anyone sees what is at the bottom anyway, and it still loads.
4. Go through third-party content. Every map, every widget, every analytics tool: is it needed?

Then measure again on a mobile phone. In most cases that settles the matter, and permanently, because you will decide differently with the next image.

No — and that is an important difference from many other systems.

A published page from Aurora Hive Sites is finished HTML. When it is opened, nothing is calculated and nothing is looked up; the file is delivered. Whether there are five or five hundred pages behind it makes no difference to the visitor.

What grows with size:

• The time it takes to publish. You notice it, not your visitors.
• The storage requirement — through images and files, not through pages.
• The maintenance effort. The biggest item, and the only one that really counts.

So the limit is not the technology but you: the number of pages you can keep up to date.

Yes, but only a manageable amount — provided they come from your own server. That is exactly how it is set up here: fonts are delivered with the site and not loaded from a third-party provider.

There are two reasons for this, and the second is the more important one:

• Speed. One connection fewer to a third-party server.
• Data protection. A font fetched from a third-party server transmits your visitor’s IP address there — without consent. Websites have received formal legal warnings (Abmahnungen) for exactly this.

If you have the choice: two font styles are enough — one for headings, one for body text. Each additional one costs, without anyone noticing.

For three reasons that come together:

• The connection. The mobile network is less stable than a fixed line, especially when out and about.
• The device. A three-year-old phone calculates more slowly than your computer.
• The same data. The images are the same, the network is narrower.

What follows from this: always check on mobile. If you only check at your desk, you are checking the conditions under which the fewest visitors arrive.

And one note that is often overlooked: switch off Wi-Fi when checking. Otherwise you are measuring your router, not your customers’ network.

Then the old version is in a cache — either in your browser or somewhere on the way to it.

One step at a time:

1. Hard reload — Ctrl + Shift + R (Mac: Cmd + Shift + R).
2. Private window. There is no cache there; if it is correct there, that was the cause.
3. Another device or the mobile network. This narrows it down conclusively.
4. Wait a few minutes, then try again.

And the most common cause of all: you saved but did not publish. In Aurora Hive Sites these are two different things — check that first before you doubt the browser.