Funny how many people hate a slow website experience, but don’t think about how slow their own site is.
Website speed is only going to become more important, not least because there is so much noise online from social media sites news outlets video and much much more that can distract visitors to your website from reading your content.
Why does it matter to website visitors?
Crazy egg refer to the 15 second rule. This is the average amount of time that people spend on your website, let alone a single page. If a user can’t find what they’re looking for straight away or can’t see see information in the navigation, then chances are, they’ll bounce.
This means that you can’t afford to waste any of those 15 seconds with a slow loading website.
Does your website have a high bounce rate?
Visitors may also leave your site for the following reasons:
- They don’t get what the expect – were they expecting to see something different on the landing page?
- It isn’t usable – we’ve become so used to websites and how they behave that if your experience does not match up to competitors, then people will simply leave. You may have lots to tell website visitors put bombarding them with lots of information all at once can often have a detrimental effect. Clean designs and a device-specific look and feel can have a big impact on your bounce rate.
- What do you want them to do? Too much information, confused navigations and lack of clear messaging can all make users unaware of what your website is about and consequently make visitors leave and go elsewhere.
Why site speed matters for SEO
Site speed Matters for SEO. This means that if your website is slower than your search engine competitors, there’s a good chance they will be ranked higher than you you.
Read more about site speed and SEO at cognitiveseo.com
One of our favourite tools to do a quick speed test it’s pingdom tools. This will highlight a few issues you may be having and a few things you might be able to fix in order to speed your site up.
It matters because Google sees site speed as a usability issue. Poor sight speed means that a visit to your site is likely to have a good website experience and this means that they don’t want to rank your site in search engine results.
What the experts say:
If your website is on WordPress, remember things you can do to speed it up including
- Your hosting
- Reducing the size of images
- Using the number of scripts and plugins
According to inboundthings.com, there is no excuse for a slow WordPress site:
There are some great WordPress hosting providers out there, ranging from shared hosting to dedicated hosting. Depending on the size of your business, in terms of how much traffic your are likely to get to your website, there are some fairly cost-effective solutions to get set the hosting right. From there it’s a case of picking the right theme, ensuring it doesn’t slow your site down with big images and that that you are aware of using the right plugins to help cache and optimise your site for a fast delivery to users.
According to joomlashack.com, if your website is hosted on Joomla you can speed up your websites in a similar way as you would WordPress including; choosing a good hosting company, managing extensions and optimising your images JavaScript and CSS.
Using a content delivery network on both Joomla and WordPress can improve the speed of delivery of your website content.