Is your website up to speed?
And, more importantly, is your site’s speed keeping visitors around until they become a customer? If you have any doubts about whether your site is not performing these two very basic fundamental tasks, then you need to optimise your website’s speed.
The internet is instant, fast and easy to access – your website must be the same. Today’s modern online consumers will not tolerate websites that are slow to upload or take time to navigate from page to page.
Online consumers access sites not only from the PC but also from their laptops and mobile devices. This means consumers are browsing on go. Your website simply cannot afford to be falling behind on its speed and you should check your site regularly to measure its performance.
Completing a digital marketing course is a great way to make sure you fully understand all aspects of what it takes for your website to be successful.
Website page speed is super important
The importance of your website’s speed is often overlooked, however, the speediness with which your pages load is crucial and makes all the difference between a visitor browsing more information or clicking on the exit button. Delivering fast loading website pages once a visitor has clicked on your site is one of the most important features of a top-performing site. With many websites failing to perform well – fixing the website load time should be one of your priorities.
If you find certain image-heavy pages on your website are taking longer to load, try to reduce the number of images on that particular page, especially if they are high resolution and their file sizes are big.
Why bother to test your website’s speed?
You’ve spent months creating and building your amazing website, you should be proud and ready to start doing business. But have you stopped to check the time it takes for your fantastic website to load? And have you run this test via all devices and not only your pc?
Google has a very handy tool for testing your website – and it’s free! Just enter your URL of your website and hit ‘analyze’. There’s so much useful data available by checking your website this way. Get cracking and fix up your site’s performance.
Ways to increase your website’s speed
Luckily there are many quick and handy ways to increase your website’s speed. Once you’ve spent a little time and effort attending to the speed of your website, you’ll make your URL a great place to be for your visitors and increase your SEO rank.
Here are some of the most effective tips to speed up your website.
- Hosting plan choice – Choosing a website hosting plan can seem like a simple choice, but don’t always opt for the cheaper choice as this can restrict your website’s growth and ultimately its speed.
- Unnecessary plugins – It’s often tempting to add quite a few plugins when designing your website but be careful not to include too many. Each and every plugin needs its own resource to run. It makes sense that the more plugins you have included in your site, the more resources it then needs to load and operate. Delete all unnecessary plugins and avoid being tempted to add more the longer your website is active.
- Broken links – Always check for broken links on your site and fix them immediately. Broken links in your content slows down your site’s speed.
- Enable browser caching – To give your visitors the speed they want it’s important to make sure you’ve enabled your browser caching.
- Optimise your site’s images – We all know that only top quality images should be used in the make up of your website, however it’s also important to optimise these images. Large images take much longer to load. A great tip is to reduce the size of your images however remember to not compromise on quality by doing this.
- Consider your website’s theme – Believe it or not, the theme you choose for your site can have an effect on your website’s speed. Complex website themes take longer to load than the simpler ones. Consider your theme when building your website to optimise its speed.
