You may have seen other articles we have posted on website load speed, but we can’t stress enough the importance of a quick loading website.
Even a second longer load time can result in your business losing a new customer or lead. If you think about this across a whole year, think how many potential customers and leads you could be losing! In this article I will be discussing how you can find out what needs improving on your website to increase the speed, and what the best ways are to get the changes implemented.
Not only can a slow website impact potential sales but it can also have a huge impact on SEO. Google and other Search Engines are all about user experience. This can now play a massive part in how well your website ranks, and if you have a slow website you’re not helping your chances of ranking high at all. If you’re not sure how to monitor and measure your SEO Campaign, here is a great article - How to Measure SEO: 6 Core KPIs to Track.
What Needs Working On?
There are a couple of ways you can find out what needs working on in regards to your website. It’s best to gather information and data from different resources, so you can be sure that the information is correct. The first resource to use to gather information and data is Google PageSpeed Insights. This is a feature that Google offers and is an excellent tool to get an idea of how fast your website is. Once you enter your website URL it will then display a score for both your website and your mobile site. The score will be out of 100 and the closer you’re to 100 the better. Not only will it display a score but it will also display some suggestions of what you need to fix and what you need to consider fixing. The website suggestions are what you need to focus on and make a note of. As like anything, there will be parts that you will be able to do and other parts that you will need to pass onto your website hosting company.
Another resource you can use is a website called GT Metrix. This will again provide you with a score (in this case it will give you a grade, and a percentage score). Not only does it give you a score but it gives you recommendations of what you need to work on to get your score even higher. Just to give you some comparison in terms of scores from GT Metrix, Facebook scores 99% Page Speed, BBC News Scores 92% Page speed and Wikipedia scores 85% Page speed. Next to each recommendation it will have a grade score, the lower the grade score for the recommendation the more of an impact that will have on your site. You would want to start with the recommendations which will have the biggest impact on your website. There is no point making small updates to your website that won’t impact the speed at all.
It doesn’t matter which resources or tools you use, as long as you have information and data from different ones. You will then have a better idea of what needs to be implemented and updated on your website. The next step is to collect all the information you have found and copy it over onto a list. This way you will be able to clearly see what needs to be done.
What to Do Next…
The next step is to take action on what you have discovered from the tools you have used in the previous section. You need to take the list you have compiled and go through it, checking what will have the greatest impact. As mentioned previously, you want to make changes that will have the biggest impact. Once you have completed this step you can then start work, a lot of the time it would be the case that you need to contact your website provider and pass on the information you have found. They can then start work on the changes and report back how it’s impacting your site speed. Some of the areas that may need to be worked on are:
- Image optimisation (How large images are and the resolution they’re at)
- Reduce server response time (This would be in regards to the server that your website is hosted on)
- Minify JavaScript (If your site has JavaScript you can compact the code to save bytes of data).
These are just some points which may come up for you. As long as you take note of all the points your website providers will be able to work on them for you.
Conclusion
Even if you have checked on different tools and you’re happy with your overall website speed, just remember that it can always be improved. The faster you’re able to make your website the better it is for the user, and this is the most important thing to remember. It’s all about the user’s experience. From a sales and leads point of view, the faster a user can find what they’re after, the faster they can contact you. In terms of an SEO point of view, if Google and other Search Engines can see that you have a fast website and that you’re continuing to make it faster the better, you will do better in organic results. A top tip that I can suggest is to regularly check your website speed, get into the routine of doing this and your speed will continue to improve.
