This is showing my age, but I remember the days of dial up. Oh boy, were those fun days. In the morning, I would start up my monster of a computer, turn on the modem, then go take a quick shower. By the time I returned 15 or 20 minutes later, I pray that my computer finally connected to the internet and opened up the website I was trying to get to.
Remember those days? Yeah, this was before the beauty of high-speed internet, cell phone data plans, and wireless cities. And nowadays, if you’re not already connected to the internet, then it just means you don’t have a device on you. We’ve become a generation that needs instant gratification – if we can’t find it in a matter of seconds, then we move on.
So that brings me to my point – how fast does your website go? Do you know? Do you care? You should.
A slow website can kill your return on investment. According to Kissmetrics, 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in no more than 2 seconds. Even a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7 percent reduction in conversions. One second! That means if your site does not load as soon as the person types in your URL or clicks on your search listing, that user has already moved on.
Oh, and it gets better. Not only can website speed destroy your conversion rate, but it can definitely hinder your SEO. As we’ve said dozens of times before, Google wants to give its customers the best possible experience when searching for a website. So if your website is slooooooowwwwwwww — and by slow I mean more than 5 seconds — then your ranking will go dooooowwwwwnnnn — and by go down, I mean by a lot.
Ok, so we now that we know that in the case of a website being slow kills, exactly how fast should a site be? And how can you speed it up?
Fortunately, there’s a ton of speed tests out there. Even Royal Highness Google has a free page speed test that you can check to see how fast your site really is. It checks both your desktop and your mobile, which is where it’s most important. And if that number is anything less than 85 out of 100, you got yourself an issue there and you should look into what you need to do to help that score.
Fortunately, Google gives you some ways on how to reduce your website speed, such as fixing coding, using caching, and enabling compression — all things your web developer should be taking care of. Some other things you may want to consider is:
- Check out your hosting plan – You pay for what you get. And if you have a website that’s on a shared server with hundreds of other websites, that’s going to affect your speed. So consider getting a better plan.
- Optimizing your images – The bigger the file is, the longer it takes to load on your computer. So make sure the image isn’t too big.
- Check out your plugins – If you use WordPress, you probably have a plugin or two on your website. That’s fine, but the more plugins you use, the more likely it will slow things down. So make sure you only use essential plugins.