The load speed of your website matters.
You have five seconds to capture attention before you lose visitors completely. So what happens if your website takes five seconds to load?
If your website is slow, you’re losing conversions before they even get to your page to see your content. A good load speed, industry-wide is under two seconds (bonus points if you can get it faster!). Anywhere in that range, your website is loading perceptibly fast.
If someone has to click and it goes 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… load, that’s a problem. You’ve lost them. They’ve already gotten distracted and thought about something else. They will even start thinking your website doesn’t work.
Why your website has a low load speed
So where to start? Here are some typical problems why your website might be slow.
You have a slow hosting platform
You want to make sure your host is not a shared hosting site like GoDaddy, BlueHost, or HostGator. A lot of those places are slow servers. On shared hosting, your website is using the same resources as thousands of other websites. As a result, you’re limited by the limited resources allocated to your tiny slice of the server. So make sure you’re on a good hosting platform.
Not caching your website
Caching is where a snapshot of your website shows to visitors, rather than loading a fresh copy. There is website, server and CDN(content distribution network) level cache. Each has their place in the stack to make sure the user sees the freshest and fastest version of the content.
Unoptimized images
If you have large images on your website, it forces the user to have to load heavy media elements every time they visit. Having optimized images will reduce their size and increase load speed. You can use free tools from Adobe (or elsewhere online) to resize them before you upload, or use a plugin like Imagify.io to optimize after upload.
Testing your website speed
There are some tools that you can use to test speed and cache of your website. There’s pingdom, GTMetrics and also Google Page Insights. Each of these are going to be testing by different parameters. You can test different locations, browser types, internet speeds, and whether people are using their mobile phones or not.
So try one of these tools and look at your website speed. Make sure that you have a good host and caching on your website, before testing your load speed. I recommend testing it once and then waiting for 10 to 20 minutes before testing it again. Depending on how you hit, it’s going to have a different load speed. Do the test 3 separate times to make sure that you’re getting accurate results.
Don’t lose your customers before they even get to your website. If you want some help improving your website speed, let’s schedule a conversation!
