Having a fast-loading website should be a top priority for any business. Not only does it dramatically improve the user experience, as anyone who has frustratingly had to wait while a site crawls in can attest to, it also can affect your website’s position in search rankings. Increasing your site speed is always a great idea.

Today we will take a look at the impact of site speed on your business, and some of ways you can minimize page load times and reap the rewards of a fast loading website.

Why Should I Prioritize Boosting my Site Speed?

Before we get into the ways to speed up your site, let’s talk a little bit more about the effects a poor (or a good) site speed can have on your online business.

Reason #1. It greatly affects User Engagement

The statistics on user engagement and site speed are more dramatic than you might expect.

You already know that website visitors don’t like slow-loading pages. However, the statistics on user engagement and site speed are more dramatic than you might expect.

During testing of the way they display search results, Google found that a half-second increase in the time it took the search engine to display results caused a 20% drop in traffic among test participants.

For e-commerce websites and online stores, the impact of slow page loads can be even more severe. Amazon reportedly found that a 100-millisecond delay in the time it takes their pages to load could lead to a 1% drop in revenue.

The websites for household names such as Google and Amazon also receive some amount of goodwill from their visitors: people are using them because they value the service on offer. Your site may not have those advantages.

This means that if your site isn’t loading as quickly as it could be, you are running the risk of turning away potential customers and clients, before they’ve even had a chance to get to know your business.

Make your site visitors happy, and want to keep coming back, by keeping your site from being an actively frustrating experiencing to visit.

Reason #2. The impact on your Search Engine Rankings

The second reason why you should care about site speed is that Google uses site speed data to help determine where to list your website in its search engine results.

So not only does a slow-loading website risk turning away visitors, poor page load times may also prevent potential visitors from finding their way to your site in the first place.

So not only does a slow-loading website risk turning away visitors, poor page load times may also prevent potential visitors from finding their way to your site in the first place.

Doing all you can to optimize your site to improve its position in Google’s rankings can be an effective way to increase visitors, and therefore customers and end users. While many of Google’s metrics for evaluating sites (such as relevance, quality, and authority) can seem subjective, site speed is a tangible variable where improvements can be measured.

Search Engine Optimzation (SEO) is the core of many online businesses strategies to be successful. Streamlining your site is a simple and effective way of boosting your SEO, and visitors to your site.

Three Ways to Improve your Site Speed

1. Invest intelligently in hosting

With web hosting, you often get what you pay for, and one of the first things you sacrifice is speed.

The company your website is hosted with, and the hosting package you choose, can have a major impact on performance. And yet many web business owners do very little research, choosing a familiar name, or the cheapest option you can find. With web hosting, you often get what you pay for, and one of the first things you sacrifice is speed.

Before you purchase your web hosting, look for online reviews from trustworthy, reputable sources, especially ones that can site real data about the performance of web host. Be careful, as the web hosting review business is a shady one: many reviewers stand to make boatloads from affiliate referrals, and have a lot of interest in getting you to sign up with [Insert Big Host Here]. I’d recommend the Guide to hosting we’ve written on our sister site, WPShout, as a good place to start.

If you’re already locked in with a plan on a web host that has less than stellar reviews, don’t panic. You can still make improvements to your site speed in other areas, but as your plan is approaching it’s expiry date, it might be a good idea to consider switching hosts, or having a developer help you do that.

2. Make sure your site is built on a solid foundation

Popular, and good-looking WordPress themes can end up being among the slowest sites out there…

Another factor that can drag down your site is a poorly-designed theme or architecture. Popular, and good-looking WordPress themes can end up being among the slowest sites out there because of the huge volume of code they execute and database requests they make on each page load.

When purchasing a pre-built theme, it’s always a good idea to watch with an eagle eye for speed of loading and how smooth the scrolling is on the live theme preview site. If either feel slow or choppy, then that’s a red flag that things aren’t quite optimized under the hood, as a preview site is usually running in ideal conditions.

If your site is being custom built by a developer, check out their portfolio to make sure that the sites there load quickly and smoothly. This isn’t always under their control, as sometimes clients can stubbornly cling to subpar hosting, for example, but if any flags are raised in the process, it’s always good to ask.

The number and type of plugins that are active on your WordPress site can also take a substantial toll. Deactivating any unused plugins can help improve the speed quite a bit.

3. Reduce elements loading on the page

Large images and other media files are a common culprit of slow page loads. Scripts, either by not being minified or loaded in unnecessarily, can also drag things down. Luckily, there’s quite a few very good solutions out there, especially for WordPress, for fixing these issues.

For images and media, we’ve written a post on commonsense image sizing in WordPress which we highly recommended reading. There are also quite a few plugins out there that automatically reduce the size of images on your site, the Smush plugin being a popular and effective one.

As for scripts, the Autoptimize plugin is a great solution. It automatically takes care of minifying your scripts and deferring unnecessary scripts into the footer so that they don’t slow down your load time.

If you want a more detailed introduction to site speed for WordPress sites specifically (our specialty), David’s written an in-depth primer on WordPress site speed.

Some Helpful Tools

To identify what might be slowing your site down, there are quite a few free and very helpful diagnostics tools which give you a breakdown. The following tools are highly recommended:

Google PageSpeed Insights: Not always the most reliable tool in terms of it’s analysis, and for that reason we recommend using some of the other tools below in addition to this one. But it does give you a clear insight on what problems Google is seeing, and might be docking your search ranking for.

GTmetrix or Pingdom: These tools are more reliable and give more useful analysis, and for that reason are preferred by developers. Which you use is up to your tastes.

Conclusion

Site speed has a proven effect on how long visitors will spend on your site, which in turn affects how effective your site is at converting visitors into customers. Furthermore, search engines such as Google take site speed into consideration when they evaluate your site for placement in search engine rankings. For both reasons, improving site speed is the right move for your business.

How to do it? The super-general answer is to ensure your web site is well-designed, avoid overlarge media files, and host with a suitable web host on the right type of hosting package.

Thanks for reading!