#4 – Speed Rules!
Speed is extremely important for a website. In fact, it’s so important that Google has made it an actual ranking factor. Websites that do not fully load in less than 3 seconds negatively affect your SEO and highly increase the likelihood of your visitors leaving your website and moving on to the competition. Attention spans are short – a faster loading website equals engaged users, increased conversions, and returning visitors.
Things that affect your page speed:
Website hosting – If your site is on a shared server (aka “cheap hosting”), thousands of sites are using the resources of a single server. If one site gets slammed with traffic, the trickle-down effect is that other websites run with fewer resources, resulting in sluggish performance.
All of our sites are cloud-hosted and fine-tuned for WordPress. Our servers are properly configured to be secure, fast, reliable, scalable, and not affected by other sites like shared hosting.
Code Bloat – Many themes and plugins bloat your website with a lot of unnecessary code which takes more time for your page to load.
We use premium themes and plugins that are well written with minimal code so your site is not bloated. We minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
Image Optimization – One of the biggest mistakes people make is uploading full-size images onto their website. Big no-no. This is one of the major factors in slowing down your load times. The amount of time it takes to load a 950kb image vs one under 300kb is significant. If you have multiple images on your page that are large, your visitors will have left the site before even seeing all of your images. Also, you need to make sure you are uploading images in the correct file format. Use PNGs for graphics and JPGs for photos.
Also, we highly encourage clients to not use sliders or carousels! 1) People don’t sit and stare at your page and wait for images to scroll through and 2) it slows down your page load and uses a lot of extra resources. Though those were trendy 5-10 years ago, that is not the case anymore. Trendy design does not equal good user experience. 🙂
All of our websites utilize two different image compression tools. That way, your image size is reduced on the page while the image quality remains intact.
Page Caching – Your computer’s browser caches (saves) a lot of information such as stylesheets, images, JavaScript files, and more, so that when a visitor comes back to your site, the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire page. Typically, any requested page will generate at least 80 database queries in order to build the HTML needed to display the page.
We use page caching on our sites so the next time the webpage is requested, our web server will first check to see if there is an HTML version of the page, then quickly serve up that page to the site visitor resulting in increased load times.
All of our websites are hosted on premium cloud servers and built with tools for the best in page load times. We love running page speed tests! Make sure your site is loading fast to serve up the best user experience for your visitors as well as appeal to search engines!
We are happy to run a speed test on your website. Let us know if we can help!
