Your website speed may be the last thing on your mind but the speed of your website affects much more than you think! Bounce rates, search ranking, page views and general user satisfaction can be affected by the speed of your website. With all of these in the mind, at the end of the day it means you could be losing revenue!
How fast should my website be?
Okay, so here’s where it starts to get a little complicated. You’ll read research online saying 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. The problem with this is a lot of these facts and figures are dated and with the vast difference in companies, user markets and platforms how can one figure fit all?
We believe the best way to tackle this challenge is to look at your current website and think:
- Is it dated? How long ago was your website built? Is the technology up to date and secure?
- Is it aesthetically pleasing? Can users navigate your website well?
- Do you use third party websites? Embedding information into your website?
- Do you sell online? Is your website using a lot of memory?
- Who hosts your website? Are you getting the best package for what your website needs?
- How many images are you using? Can they be optimised?
- Is it well built? Can it be optimised? Can it be rebuilt with better software?
If you’ve been through and got all of these to the best they can be and your load time is still 4 to 5 seconds, it’s okay!
Trying to get your website the right speed can be a bit of a balancing act and more often than not, a pain. There are tons of factors which can affect your website speed and when your website is using third party systems, page speed speed is often no longer in your hands.
So website speed can’t be that important?
Incorrectimondo! The speed of your website even if it cannot reach the 3 second mark is crucial to your website performing better for your business. The faster your website the more trust your users will build in you. Online web users like good content and they like it now, if your website is a struggle to use and takes a while to load your visitors wont stay!
You may be thinking ‘oh well, what’s one impatient user’. Well, it doesn’t just stop there. People who have bad experiences online are likely to share it with their friends, family and colleagues. Meaning that one bad experience potentially means a whole bunch of people which will also share that bad experience.
The speed of your website will also help you with your google rankings. The experts at Moz indicated that slow page speed means ‘search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget’ and is likely to negatively affect your ranking positions.
How do I know if my website is performing well?
There are several tools online where you can have a look at how your website is performing and how fast it’s loading. Just remember, these tools are brilliant to get a general idea but don’t get to fixated on the numbers. The best way to get a general idea on how your doing is to perform multiple tests throughout the day with several different tools.
- Google page insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- GTmetrix: https://gtmetrix.com/
- Pingdom: https://tools.pingdom.com/
- Google mobile speed: https://testmysite.withgoogle.com
I need help!
If you need help getting up to speed, Redder have strategies in place to solve all the issues mentioned above. We will analyse your current system, advice you on what features of your website are working well, which can be done better and what you don’t even need. We’ll look through every aspect of your website and get your running at rocket speed with a website that’s as best as it can be! Talk to us