Let’s face it. Nobody likes waiting for pages to load. A slow site can cost you valuable time and money. You’re losing potential customers and revenue, if your site isn’t converting those potential ‘call to actions’ into actual sales. Let’s get you a faster website.
Here are some stats on page speed and how it affects your sales: (Courtesy of Kissmetrics)
- 7% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
- If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.
Also, site speed affects your SEO. Read more about that here: What Is SEO?
How can we make our site faster?
First, let’s take a baseline speed test. You can do this with GTmetrix or Google Page Speed Insights.
Once you have the results, you can see what’s causing the slow down.
Here are some common things to fix:
- Unoptimized images: A large volume of unoptimized images is usually the most common reason behind website slowness. My favorite way to optimize images, is to either download all of the images and reduce their footprint with software, or if you’re using WordPress, using a plugin like WP Smushit.
- JavaScript Issues: Java script can slow down your website if it’s used incorrectly, but you can fix that issue by combining and compressing multiple files into one file. We can do this either manually or with the help of this plugin.
- Excessive HTTP Requests: While it doesn’t hurt to have some extra files, and you don’t necessarily need to remove them, try to remove unnecessary files from loading. Doing so can reduce the number of your requests.
- Not using a cache: Using a cache is so important. When a web page loads, the browser looks in the cache first, to see whether the code is already there. Since some of this data is stored temporarily in the memory, it’s called “cached.” I recommend using WP Rocket as it can fix so many of these issues.
- Not Using gZIP Compression: Enabling gZIP compression will instruct the server to compress all your web objects into one container before sending it to a browser and in turn make your website load much faster. Contact your hosting provider if you’re not sure how to enable this on your website. Learn more about gZIP here: What’s gZIP?
- Bad hosting: Your web hosting service provider makes a huge difference when it comes to website performance. This is one of the most important changes you can make. If you are with a questionable host (starts with G ends with Y), you will see a huge difference once you switch. I recommend Cloudways, WP Engine or Kinsta. (Not paid for these links!)
- CDN’s: Using CDN’s helps decrease the time it takes to load web pages since the content is loaded near the user, rather than loading data from your server located thousands of miles away. I recommend using Cloudflare.
I would know to answer any questions, so please reach out if you have any!
I know those causes seem daunting, but don’t panic! If you really want to get a faster website, I can help. Reach out here!
