If your business depends heavily on IT processes and you have personnel who handle the tech work, there may be times when you find yourself lost in the technical jargon that they use. You may hear them discuss the need to ping website pages more frequently or which event logs and codes to dump, etc. 

Even if you are sure that your tech guys are trustworthy, it will be immensely helpful for you and your enterprise to have a decent understanding of IT terminologies and an overview of their importance. One important term for your enterprise is “website ping,” which is a performance metric that can spell the difference between sales and missed sale opportunities for your business.

This article will attempt to define website ping using the simplest of terms, discuss why it is important for online businesses and tips on how to discuss issues concerning slow website speeds with your IT team.

In a broader sense, a “ping” is a method used to test if a particular website page is up and is reachable. The term came from the sonar “pings” that submarines send out to map the environment outside the vessel and to locate other ships nearby. If the ping that the submarine emitted bounces back, it means that an object is within the vicinity. By measuring the time it took for the sonar ping to bounce back, the crew of the submarine is able to determine the distance and speed of the object.

Pings that are used on the internet work in a very similar way. A computer sends out a ping to a particular target web page to check if it is available. The web page will send back a response to the computer if it is available. Measuring the time it takes between the ping and the arrival of the ping response determines the speed of the connection between the computers, as well as the server (the computer that hosts the website) speed. By today’s standard, ping times are measured by the millisecond. The lower the ping time, the faster the connection and the website response time.

In today’s ultrafast internet connections and powerful processors, speed matters. Retail giant Amazon conducted an internal study that showed that it stands to lose billions of dollars in revenue if their website were a second slower when it comes to page loading times. Similar studies conducted by other major companies have yielded similar results. The studies suggest that internet users have become less tolerant of slow websites and are likely to move on to other sites if a website fails to load within three seconds.

It wouldn’t be stretch to assume that the impatience of internet users will also be tested if their browsers are slow to connect to a particular website. There are a number of factors that can affect page loading speeds. When it comes to high website pings, however, the cause is likely a slow server or a slow internet connection.

Your ping numbers definitely matter and you’ll want to keep it as low as possible. There are available online tools that allow you to check out your website’s ping. More importantly, you can also use such online tools to check on the website ping of your competition to see how your website measures up.

It is important to keep in mind that your IT team may not have a full appreciation of the business side of matters. For this reason, it is important that you emphasize the need to have lower website ping numbers. Ask for their opinions on how you can speed it up. Since sluggish website pings are primarily due to slow servers and internet connections, you may likely have to shop around for a new service provider or host,.