Have you recently been frustrated by a slow website?
Trying to order something in the sale and being faced with nothing but a white loading screen? Not that it’ll be much comfort, but this is a problem a lot of customers are facing at the moment: slow websites.
Site speed is often something that gets thrown around and, unfortunately, put to the back of the queue behind implementing PPC and expanding the content on your website. Don’t get us wrong, we’re not saying that these are not important goals but you cannot ignore site speed.
Why you should care about website speed
Your website is the foundation of your digital presence. You can have amazing marketing and a fantastic product but if you haven’t got a great website experience you will be wasting money.
Recent surveys have shown that 90% of customers say they are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. Alarmingly more than 75% of customers reported leaving a slow-loading website for a competitor’s site.
This problem compounds itself when your audience is visiting your website on a mobile. We cannot assume that every customer of yours is on the latest phone with 5G. The split between mobile and desktop users is a close 50/50 with some reports giving mobile the win with 52% of users.
It’s important to make sure that whichever device your customer chooses to use, they can interact with your website efficiently with as little friction as possible, a fast website goes a long way to achieve that goal.
Lastly, Google has said that it takes user experience into account and a large part of that is site speed. For SEO, Google always puts the users and user experience at the top of it’s considerations. The bottom line is that a slow website will not rank as well as fast one.
A poor website will also cost you PPC performance, Google takes site speed into account when deciding your quality score. A high quality score leads to better ad performance and lowered costs, a poor quality score gives the opposite. It’s in your best interest to have the fastest website you can.
What contributes to poor page speed
The speed of your website is determined by a range of factors including:
Unoptimised images
Large images work to showcase your business or your products, they work to entice customers to learn more about you and can really set the tone of your website. However, there is a balance between huge images and user experience.
Keep in mind that users will have to load whatever images, videos or animation you through at them so make sure that any images are optimised for speed and be considerate of how many you add to a page.
Javascript bloat
JavaScript and jQuery plugins have made it simple to add dynamic content to websites to show off your business. As with all aspects of developing a website, if you use too many of these or implement them incorrectly you can bring your website to a screeching halt in terms of speed.
Only use what you really need and remove what you don’t when it comes to plugins. If you’re adding a lot of tool codes to your website we recommend using something like Google Tag Manager to hold all of these in one place.
Not using a cache effectively
If you’re not using caching on your website, you’re missing out on real speed improvements. Correctly implemented caching techniques allow you store frequently visited points in the ‘cached memory’.
The next time a user goes to load that same point it will be loaded from the cache, making the process of presenting the information they’re looking for much faster. Caching is something that can bring fantastic improvements in terms of speed, but done incorrectly it can cause problems, we recommend leaving this one to the experts.
Your hosting is less than impressive
Hosting is something that a lot of people want to pay as little for as possible, but this is very much a case of you get what you pay for. You might be able to host your website for £1 a month, but you won’t be getting the best experience. You’ll be getting a one size fits all solution that most likely won’t be tailored to your needs.
We offer tailored, managed hosting packages that will keep your website secure and fast for your users. We always aim to give your site the best possible response time, uptime and page speed. These are all of the elements that you need from your hosting provider to give your website the best possible chance of ranking organically and giving the best user experience.
These are just some of the issues that can slow your website down and ruin your user experience. Think of a website as an overloaded car, the more you add to it without increasing how much power is in the car and optimising the power you do have, you’ll never get it moving.
There’s a lot to consider when it comes to the speed of your website. We’re here to help you navigate all of the options and find you the perfect solution for your business.
If your goal for 2022 is to improve your websites speed and performance, we’re here to help.
Sun, 09 January 2022