Website Speed Optimization Guide for Small Businesses
What is page speed?
Page speed refers to how long it takes for a web page or website to load in the browser. Since most people have fast internet connection speeds, even a single second can make a difference when loading your page.What’s a good website speed that I should aim for?
In theory, your website should load within 3 seconds. Anything more than that increases your website’s bounce rate to 32%. In a set of 100 visitors going to your website, you’d lose 32 people after the 3-second mark, or worse, all if your website loads slower than 10 seconds.Why is website performance & page load speed so important?
Other than the fact that people hate slow websites, Google is now using speed as a ranking factor in its algorithm. So when users are looking for products or services, they are more likely to go with businesses whose website loads much faster and give them their money.The Importance of Website Speed Performance for Business Success
Sales are Affected by Your Website Speed
If your website is slow and doesn’t load, consumers won’t think very highly of it. When they can get what you offer from a competitor with a better experience, why would they choose to stick around? Not only that, but if you’re trying to keep an existing customer who has a slow connection or device (like someone on their phone), they are less likely to buy from your website. This means losing out on potential sales and revenue!Conversion Rates are Affected by Your Website Speed
If your website is slow, users are less likely to want to stay on it. If they decide to stick around and wait for the site to load, their patience will run out pretty quickly. Once that happens, you lose them as a customer because of poor page speed performance! Do everything possible, so this doesn’t happen.User Engagement is Affected by Your Website Speed
When your website is slow and takes a while to load everything on the page, it frustrates users. They wait for extra things like images and videos to load before reading what you have written or seeing an ad that interests them. If this happens often enough, then those visitors will leave as well!Your Revenue is Affected by Your Website Speed
With fewer visitors and customers, your revenue will fall as well. Not only that, but if your website is slow enough, you might be losing out on search engine rankings. Google’s speed factors are updated quite often, and it’s essential to keep up with them, so you don’t lose out! If you want to make sure that this doesn’t happen, speed up your website!Usability and User Experience is Affected by Your Website Speed
Yes, your website might not be as pretty if it’s faster. However, what matters most is that users can access everything on the page and have a good experience! Many factors affect speed performance. Understanding these will help you improve your site’s speed by giving you ideas for how to fix them:How can you optimize page speed and improve your search rankings?
Many factors affect website speed, and we encourage you to implement some or all of the following suggestions.Reduce image sizes
Uploading huge images is a common mistake small business owners do that hurts and directly affects their website page speed.
Images can make up most of your page size. If you have a lot of images on your website, they can seriously affect speed performance.
Use image compression tools to reduce file size and load time. Here are some tools you can use:
Image files are often very big in resolution! If this is the case for some or all of your images, it’s probably because you’re using really high resolutions that aren’t necessary.
Reduce the amount of unnecessary and outdated plugins
If you have too many plugins or third-party scripts, It’s important to disable all unnecessary scripts and code on your page, so it runs faster. Clean up any messy coding by getting rid of javascript, CSS, or other code that is not necessary for your site. Remove any plugins you don’t use to reduce the chances of slowing down your website speed even more! Lastly, make sure all third-party scripts and codes are working ok before implementing new changes on it. It can be a headache if they’re broken!Having many ads displayed on your website
Served ads slow down your website as well. This is because you’re pulling resources from a third party rather than having these ads hosted on your server, as well as having tracking pixels that do not serve your business or your audience.Reduce redirects
Redirects also negatively affect your site speed, so make sure you have a few of them as possible. They add additional unnecessary loading time, so only use them if necessary, for example, when you want to track clicks from campaigns, etc.Use caching services
There is no point in re-loading the duplicate files every time someone visits your website, and it takes forever to load because of that. So use tools like Cloudflare or your favorite caching plugin, which reduces the number of requests needed to load it.Minify CSS/JS files
Use minifying services that will strip the unnecessary characters from the code to speed up loading time.Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is one of the best ways to speed up your website, so consider using it, especially if you have an eCommerce store or blog that gets lots of traffic! The way this works is when visitors come in, they will get their files from different servers based on where they are located. This way, you can reduce server load and increase speed performance!
The above are just a few examples of factors that affect website speed—ensuring that your website loads fast is a very tedious process.
If you want to improve your website performance and boost its search rankings, then make sure that every page on your website loads within a maximum of three seconds.
If you need help optimizing your website, we can help! Be sure to inquire about our WordPress Website Speed Optimization Services today.
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