Website Speed is becoming more important than ever!

Do you know what could be slowing down your website? Are you losing sales to poor website performance?

The overall speed is affected by a huge variety of factors, yet the main area you should focus on is on your fundamental design [1].  Designing and Building a highly functional site to best practice will ensure faster page loading times. 

It’s fairly obvious that website speed plays an important role in the user experience, yet many website owners don’t realise that is an important factor to consider within technical SEO. Search Engine Optimisation [2] is becoming more reliant on Speed Tests as users bounce rates from long loading sites clearly demonstrate these statistics to Search Engines. 

It also worth noting that your website speed also affects the performance of your Paid Advertising. Paid Search and Paid Social advertising will be less effective and actually cost more per click when your website is performing poorly.  Advertising platforms do not want to send their users to poor sponsored links when they perform badly.  It is definitely worth your time and investment in speeding up your site.  It should be regularly reviewed and checked frequently.

If you haven’t been ranking well, it could be that your website is just too slow and people are bouncing quickly. Never forget that page-speed is a known ranking factor, so you need to devote your time to speed up your site by using a variety of techniques.

Some Tips for Speeding up your Site

  • File Compression of Code where possible – reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes.
  • Leverage Site Caching when appropriate – If your design doesn’t change frequently, returning users can reload the pages quicker. Google has more information about leveraging caching here.
  • Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN) – Essentially, various copies of the website are stored at multiple, geographically diverse data centres so that users have faster and more reliable access to your site.
  • Optimise the size of your Images – Using suitable file types such as PNG and JPEG will reduce the load time considerably. Reducing the file size, yet maintaining significant quality is a primary focus. 
  • Reduce the number of active Plugins – the amount of software you use to make your site work efficiently will reduce the overall speed of your site.  Planning an efficient site is possible with a reduced rate of plugins. If something is practically unnecessary, remove it. Clearly Speed optimisation plugins are also beneficial.
  • Hosting Providers are important – Choosing a hosting service that promotes better quality file storage is crucial.  Ensuring that your site is hosted on Solid-State Drives is mandatory for efficient file hosting. 

Getting Your Website Up To Speed

How do I check my website speed?

There are lots of free testing tools for checking the speed of your sites, such as GTmetrix and WebPageTest. Google Page Insights is perhaps the most reliable tool for improving speed in relation to SEO. Simply add your domain to the search tabs they provide.  These online tools usually list some key recommendations for you to make.

Although many website owners actually believe that their website is quick enough, ideally your site should load in two to three seconds. This is increasingly important on mobile devices as people are actively processing information quicker. Bounce-rates are a critical statistic for Google bots crawling your website.  This will ultimately affect the indexing of your pages and the ranking that your website receives. 

So let’s get your site up to speed. Avoid your customers abandoning a loading shopping cart.

Talk to our team about your website performance. 

Let us know what score your website received in various speed tests.

Comment below and we can give you some feedback.