There are Billions of websites on the information superhighway.
Some quick ways of standing out from the crowd is with graphics, images, functionality and user experience.
It is increasingly becoming more important to focus on website speed and load time.
Google is putting more emphasis on the page load time factor and may even rank your competitor higher in search results just because your competitor loads a page a fraction of a second quicker than you do. There are of course many other factors like backlinks, domain authority and so on that influence this but more and more brands online are investing heavily on their website speed. Especially when they know, slow websites spell slow death; they kill conversions and increase bounce rates, not to mention the bad first impression.
Speed is everything in the digital world where people hate slow checkout counters in the supermarket, slow freeways and even slow cars or trucks blocking their way on the road.
Here are a few things to watch out for that could be slowing your site down:
- The images you are using on your site could be slowing your site down. Do you know the size of the image? Is it in MB or KB? What is the resolution of the placeholder for the image? If it is a thumbnail then what’s the point in uploading a high-resolution image that is a few MB’s in size?
- How long does your server take to load your website content? If your host is slow then regardless of what actions you take the root cause remains unaddressed.
- Investigate themes and plugins for speed. Remove what you don’t use and make sure plugins and themes are always up to date with the current version.
In Conclusion
Do a basic speed test of your website today and start with your home page.
For quick wins:
1. Use a free CDN – CloudFlare
2. Caching plugin – W3 Total Cache
3. Image compress plugin
Speed matters and it certainly can get you more traffic and help with improved conversions on your site.
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