Your website’s speed may not be high on your list when considering how you can make your website better but it should be.
The overall time it takes for your website to load can greatly affect visitor interaction.
One study by Google found 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load! That’s why it’s important to increase the speed of your website.
Now, if you’re like most business owners, you probably want people and potential customers to stay on your web page.
Read on to discover more about website speed and how to improve your score.
What Is Website Speed
Website speed is the amount of time it takes for a website to load and display in a web browser.
A lot of things can determine how fast a website loads, such as how many images are on the page to how fast the user’s internet is.
Some of these things are out of your control but others aren’t and can be optimised to get the best possible loading time and keep visitors on your page.
How to Test Your Website’s Speed
You need to find out your current website’s speed to know what actions to take to increase your page’s speed performance.
There are loads of different tools you can use but we recommend either GTmetrix or Google Page Insights. They are both free to use and can be helpful.
Using Google’s tool as an example, you would input your website’s URL into the text field and then click analyse.
After a few seconds, you will be shown a performance score of your website for both desktop & mobile devices and some tips on how to improve the score.
The score you receive can fluctuate so it may be best to analyse your page a few times to get an average result.
It’s important to remember that the score represents the speed performance of your whole site with page loading time being one element.
Also, achieving a score of 100 is very unlikely. Even the websites of major corporations don’t hit 100.
In our example test, Apple received a score of 72 for desktop!
What is important, however, is improving the areas of your website that you have control over. Do you need that WordPress plugin or all of those images on your page?
If yes, that’s okay, but if not, that is where you can start to bring your performance score up and your page loading time down.
Why the Speed of Your Website Matters
People hate waiting.
Imagine you walk into a store and you see the line for the cashier is really long. What would your reaction be?
A lot of people would probably walk out without buying anything.
We live in a world where faster is considered better and it’s the same for your website.
If a visitor on your website has to wait, you can almost guarantee that they will leave to check out your competition instead.
You could be missing out on customers simply because your website didn’t load fast enough.
There have been studies by Akamai who found that two seconds is the threshold for e-commerce site acceptability.
Even if your website isn’t an online store, people will want your page to load fast.
A good time to aim for is 3 seconds and under.
Page speed can also affect your site’s SEO. Google prefers fast-loading websites so by improving your speed you can increase your ranking in search results.
How to Improve Your Website’s Speed
There are some easy things you can do to increase the loading time of your website.
Optimise Images
Photos are definitely great to have on your website. They can be used to show off your products or the quality of your services and improve the user experience by breaking up segments of text.
Unoptimised images, however, can slow down your page.
Images that are very large put a strain on your website and can dramatically increase the loading time.
To reduce the effect they have, make sure you reduce the size of an image before you use it on your website. You can do this by using photo optimisation software like Pichi.
Use Browser Caching
Caching is a useful feature of web browsers. It can reduce the page load time for returning visitors by storing necessary elements of your website, such as images, in a viewer’s browser cache folder on their computer.
The next time they visit your site, the browser can use the cache files to load the website instead of requesting the site from the server.
Many people fail to use this tool, which results in slower load times and higher levels of frustration for visitors.
You can usually find your websites cache settings within your hosting dashboard.
Remove Unnecessary Plugins
Running a lot of plugins on your website can contribute substantially to slower page load speeds.
Plugins are attractive because they are convenient and easy to use, but using too many will cause your load speed to plummet and result in poor user experience.
Always make sure you’re benefiting from whatever plugins you use on your website.
For example, do visitors use the on-site chat function? If not, it might be time to remove it.
Also, consider different ways you can achieve the same result you get from using a plugin.
Having a plugin show Google Maps on your page is great but, with a little know-how, you can make that happen without using a plugin.
Now that you know the importance of website loading speeds, you can focus on making changes to your website and increase the chances of a visitor having a satisfying experience on your site.
Of course, it may be time-consuming and technically challenging to do these changes yourself. It can be a lot of work to stay on top of it all.
That is why we take care of things as part of our website management and hosting.
We always make sure we aim for the very best website speeds possible and are constantly optimising our clients’ websites to maintain great performance scores.
Contact us today for more information about how we can help your business.
