How slow website page speeds could be costing you money
Page speed can have a big influence on how a website converts visitors into leads or sales. Amazon and Google, both huge companies, take page speed very seriously, so should you!
40% of consumers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Amazon found out that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google discovered that an extra half second’s search result generation time caused traffic to drop by 20%.
Businesses rely on websites to capture leads, sell products, keep customers informed. So a fast, optimised site is critical. A slow, unresponsive website is a sure fire way of wasting all of your marketing efforts.
You probably spend a significant amount of time trying to attract people to your website in the hope of the user completing a goal. Once a visitor arrives at your website you want them to hang around for as long as possible. The chances of that happening diminish if your site page loading speeds are slow.
Slow page speeds waste marketing efforts
Imagine the scenario; I want to encourage more sign-ups on our website to help grow a mailing list. I write a blog post about something that potential clients would find useful. I then convert the article into a document to summarise the information. We offer the material is as a free download to anyone who subscribes. MailChimp then stores the contact information. Great. That is until the user reaches our slow loading website. The user becomes frustrated and leaves. All that marketing effort has gone to waste, just because of slow page speed.
Every 1 second delay in page speed decreases page views by 11% and conversion rates by 7% according to Aberdeen Group research.
A lightning-fast page speed improves visitor engagement, retention, and boosts sales and leads to higher conversion rates.
Optimising your website page speed is one of the most affordable ways of increasing your return on investment!
What is page speed?
Page speed refers to the length of time it takes to download a web page from the server to the browser. You can test your website speed with a tool such as the one from Pingdom
What causes poor page speed?
Understanding what slows down your website is key to improving performance.
The primary causes for a slow WordPress website are:
- Web Hosting – A poor quality and incorrectly configured shared hosting service will affect overall website page speed.
- WordPress Configuration – If your WordPress site is not serving cached pages, this could overload the server thus causing your website to be slow or crash entirely.
- Large images can have a large impact on page speed.
- Bad Plugins – If you’re using a poorly coded plugin, then it can significantly affect page speed.
- Using a WordPress theme with lots of unused functionality and code that grinds the site down to a halt.
- External scripts – External scripts such as ads, font loaders, etc. can also have a huge impact on your website performance and page speed.
How to speed up your website in 2018
Speeding up your website can seem like a daunting task, that’s why we have listed below the main areas to concentrate on.
Good WordPress hosting
WordPress hosting service plays an important role in website performance. A good shared hosting provider ensures the hosting is suitable for WordPress and take the extra measures to optimise a website for performance and increase page speed.
Be aware that shared hosting means just that, you are sharing the hosting with other customers. If those other sites are busy, it is likely to slow down the other sites on the shared server. While more expensive, dedicated servers are much faster and stable.
Install a WordPress caching plugin
When a site is cached, it means the site’s pages and content are stored on the user’s local hard drive. This, in turn, means that when a user opens a frequently accessed file, the browser will have most (if not all) of its files cached. This is a much faster way of serving your web files and greatly increase page speed.
Optimise images for speed
No matter how optimised your website is, images will always be one of the slowest-loading elements on the page. If you want to speed up WordPress to the max, you need to implement a strategy that targets images specifically. There are two ways to optimise images. Either using an image editing software programme or through a plugin on your WordPress website. This will ensure you achieve great optimisation of your images. Smaller files load quicker and take up less space, which in turn means your site is leaner and faster. This is excellent news for the optimisation score and faster page speeds!
Keep Your WordPress site updated
WordPress and plugin files not to be up to date to ensure your website remains fast, secure and reliable.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDN is short for ‘content delivery network.’ These are a network of servers located around the world. They host and deliver copies of your WordPress site’s content. Simply put a CDN will serve up your content quicker and reduce the time the browser has to wait before receiving its first byte of data from the server. This results in a much quicker browsing experience for the user.
Don’t upload videos directly to WordPress
Uploading large videos to WordPress not only takes up large amounts of disk space on your server it also slows down your site. Better to link the content from a direct source such as YouTube. After all, that’s what YouTube does, and does very well! Let their servers take the burden for you, keep your site lean and mean!
Use a theme optimised for page speed
When we develop a website, we are cautious of using off the shelf themes. Why? Themes like this are usually bloated with all kind of functionality that users either don’t need or won’t use. A sure-fire way to slow page speed down. Sure the themes can look great, but get under the bonnet of them. They are full of redundant code and plugins, which all serves to slow your page speed down. If you do use a theme like this, be sure to look for clean and well-optimised code and only with the functionality you need.
Wrap up
Fast page load speeds should not be underestimated. Digital marketing takes a great amount of effort that is wasted if the user leaves your site due to a slow loading web page!
Applying all of the above is a time consuming and tedious process, and there can be a lot of trial and error working out works or not. Our Premium and Enterprise Support Plans include website speed optimisation as part of the package.
If you would like to know more or chat to us about anything in this article, please feel free to get in touch at info@wpcareplans.co.uk.