If you’re wondering if it’s necessary have a website that loads quickly, wonder no more. The impact that your website speed has on traffic, conversions and revenue should not be underestimated. Research has shown that 40% of people will abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Luckily, there are tweaks you can make that will help your site load faster helping ensure your customers don’t leave in frustration. Speed up your website to ensure its success.
Check the Speed of Your Website
Check your current website load-time by using Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights to do this. Knowing the load time before you make adjustments will allow you to compare the speed changes once you’re done.
It’s also important to note that Google uses website speed as a ranking factor. A slow loading site could potentially hurt your site’s ranking in search engine results. There are some factors that may be out of your control when it comes to ranking well. Improving your website’s loading time doesn’t have to be one of them.
How to Speed Up Your Website
One of the contributing factors to a slow-loading site is images. Choosing the wrong formats or having larger than necessary images can impact your site’s performance. Having having unoptimized images will affect the loading speed of your site.
Other factors that add loading time are page redirects, browser caching and page size. If your website isn’t built correctly these issues can affect your page views and customer engagement.
To see what issues your website is having use Website Grader and get your score. Do you have to fix everything the speed service recommends? No, but you should address the major issues to improve the visitor’s experience.
Not sure how to improve the performance yourself? Contact me for a free website review!
In conclusion, the best performing websites load in under three seconds. A second delay could result in the loss of of a potential customer.