Your website speed affects your bottom line, whether you know it or not. A slow website can impact how many people you reach and your number of conversions. More than half of users expect a web page load time of 2 seconds or less.
How Does Site Speed Optimization Directly Affect Your Bottom Line?
Slow site = High exit rate.
More and more people are using the internet to do business, and more specifically on mobile phones. With this shift, the expectation of mobile-friendly websites has increased as well. If your site isn’t as quick as your users expect it to be, there are an exponential amount of other sites that are. They’ll simply leave before you even have a chance to win them over.
A successful website is a website with fast page speeds. It’s no secret that online visitors want to use a quick and responsive website whether they’re on mobile or desktop. In order to understand the relationship between your site speed and your bottom line, we identified some of the issues that might be slowing your website down.
Before addressing site speed, let’s look at how your site is performing. Here is a tool that allows you to check your site speed, as well as your core web vitals. This will help you identify where your site currently stands before we address how to fix it.
So, you’ve now utilized the Google PageSpeed tool and identified that your site is performing slowly. Don’t worry — we’ve got some suggestions for you. Some of them are relatively simple to implement and will have a big impact on your site speed optimization, while others are a little more difficult and bring fewer results. We’ll take you through both categories.
Optimize Images
Websites require visuals. With websites getting more and more modern, higher-quality images are being used. Some sites even use AI and automation to bring browsing experiences to life, such as a tool that allows you to view a hardwood floor color in your living room. However, these image sizes might harm your site from a speed standpoint.
An easy way to fix this is to ensure your images aren’t too large and fully compressed. WP has numerous tools that allow you to do this automatically, such as Ewww Image Optimizer.
Third-Party Plugins
With all of these new websites, comes plugins. Usually, plugins make your life easier, but sometimes plugins become outdated or broken.
Make sure to update your plugins regularly with the latest patch. Not only does this improve your site speed, but it often improves the UX of your site as well. If you have too many plugins installed on your site or are using old versions of a plugin, your site might slow down to try and deal with it.
Your web hosting and maintenance provider will often update plugins and test them to ensure no issues. If your hosting and maintenance provider is not doing your site updates and you’re concerned that your plugins might negatively affect your site speed, you might consider a different website hosting and maintenance company.
Number of Redirects
Similar to plugins, redirects are implemented to help users get to where they need to go. Sometimes, however, this could be slowing down your site speed. The more redirects, the more it increases loading times on your site.
These are just a few reasons your site might be slower than expected.
Tips to Increase Site Speed
Minify CSS and JavaScript files & asynchronous loading – Remove bloat from your site. Minifying CSS and JavaScript won’t make much difference to site speed, but coupled with the other methods, it can result in much better performance. Once you’ve minified and compressed these files, you can optimize how they load. If your files are loaded asynchronously, your elements will load at the same time.
Browser HTTP Caching & Minimize HTTP Requests – Developers can tell browsers to cache webpage elements that don’t change often. This will reduce the data that a server needs to transfer to the browser, minimizing load times. Minimizing HTTP requests decreases the time spent downloading elements such as images, stylesheets, and scripts.
Use a CDN – Typically, your site is hosted on one server, so every visitor who accesses your site sends a request to the same server. When your server is experiencing high traffic levels, this can result in slow site speeds. With a CDN (Content Delivery System), you cache your site on a global network of servers, often using the closest server.
Conclusion
There are many ways to increase site speed, some of which are more effective than others. If you’re struggling with site speed and worried about it affecting your bottom line, start by running a site speed test. Next, tackle some of the areas we mentioned above to get that site speed working for you rather than against you.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a great free tool that we use when addressing many of these issues.
More questions regarding WordPress site speed optimization? Get in touch with Beanstalk and let’s talk.