Why You Need a Faster Website and How To Optimize Speed
Whether or not speed is a Google ranking indicator is irrelevant. What does matter is in today’s on demand culture, visitors/customers will not wait for your website to load. Your websites sluggishness could not only be losing you traffic, but profit as well. Here are the facts.
Slow Websites Lead to:
- Increased Bounce Rate – By the time 3 seconds has passed, 40% of your potential visitors will abandon your site and most likely head straight to a competitor.
- Loss of Sales – a 1 second delay on your page load can decrease conversion rates by 7%.
- Loss of Future Sales – Online shoppers dissatisfied with the speed of an eCommerce store are 79% less likely to return for future purchases.
You don’t wait for slow websites to load, why would you think your customers are any different?
Ideally you want your pages to load in under 2 seconds, but how can you accomplish this?
How To Speed Up Your Website:
- First check your website with speed tools like Pingdom or GTMetrix. They will also give you ideas on how to improve load time.
- Like most endeavor’s, start at home. Your hosting could be contributing to your load time. If you went with cheap hosting, odd’s are you get what you pay for. I’ve used plenty of hosting companies and the one I’ve been most happy with is A2 hosting. They are fast and their speeds and uptime have been quite consistent.
- Use a CDN. Content Delivery Networks not only speed up your site by serving static content with global delivery points, but also save you hosting bandwidth. Cloudflare offers a free CDN with pricing options when your site grows.
- Media. Is your site slowing down due to large video or image files? Compress large image files down using sites like Optimizilla.
- CSS and JS files. Minifying and combining multiple CSS and JS files can easily speed up your website.
- Cache. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, plug-ins like W3 Total Cache can help speed your website up. Just be sure to optimize it and follow their guide to set it up. Odd’s are you will have to do some tinkering.
- Plug-ins, themes and more. If you are using a CMS, your themes and plug-ins could be bogging down your site. Delete all the ones you are not using and decide on a case by case basis, which one’s you ACTUALLY need.
- Test, test and retest. Speeding up your website is an art and you will have to continually test and retest to see what is slowing your website down and what is and isn’t working.
In the end you want your website to load in under 2 seconds. That’s the minimum. Ideally you want your site to load faster than your competitors.
Now of course these are all easier said then done. If you want to tackle performance issues yourself, go for it. You will definitely need to do some Googling to get more info on how to implement these changes, but these bullet points are definitely a great start to get you moving in the right direction.
If you feel overwhelmed by all of these ways to speed your website up, at the very least get a faster host and use cloudflare. You won’t get crazy fast speeds, but it’ll give you some decent speeds.
Of course if you feel this is too much for you, feel free to contact me and we can look into how to get your site loading at blazing speeds and the costs associated with doing so.