You know how annoying it is when a website you want to look at takes ages to load?
What do YOU do if a website takes more than a few seconds? I imagine you move on like most people. In fact, in a recent study it was found that 83% of online users expect websites to load in three seconds or less... So if your site is slow and you are lucky enough that your customer does stay, they WILL be infuriated and you don't want to give them a bad experience... Do you?
You know how annoying it is when a website you want to look at takes ages to load?
What do YOU do if a website takes more than a few seconds, I imagine you move on like most people. In fact, in a recent study it was found that 83% of online users expect websites to load in three seconds or less... So if your site is slow and you are lucky enough that your customer does stay, they WILL be infuriated and you don't want to give them a bad experience... Do you?
It's not just humans that love fast sites, Google does too and as a result, they will show a fast site higher up in search results, if your competitor has a faster site then your potential customer may never actually find you
So how do you know if your site is fast enough...?
One of the best ways is to ASK GOOGLE! Yes, Google has it's own tool tool to tell you how fast your site is, that's how much they care!
The tool is called "Google PageSpeed Insights" and it works easily and quickly within the browser and will give you all the information you need, all you have to do is go to https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and enter your website URL.
The tool will tell you how fast your site is on both desktops and mobiles (Desktop should be 90+ and Mobile should be 80+ in my experience) and also give you a report that you can give to your website developer with recommendations to make it faster. This tool will also check accessibility, SEO and best practices but those are for another post.
There are a few things you can do to make your website faster:
🟩 Choose a Good Web Hosting Service: Think of your host as the place where your website lives. You want a reliable and fast one.
🟩 Use a Simple Website Design: If you are using a theme, make sire it's one that looks clean and simple designs. Avoid really complicated designs, these tend to load slower.
🟩 Don't Use Too Many Extras (Plugins): This is especially problematic with WordPress sites, plugins are like little extra pieces of complexity for your website. Only use the ones you really need
🟩 Make Your Pictures Smaller: Big pictures take longer to load. One great website for making your images much smaller is TinyPNG.com (https://tinypng.com/). Just drop your image onto the page and it will work its magic for you!
🟩 Use Caching: This is a clever trick that helps your website load faster for people who visit it more than once. It saves parts of your website so it doesn't have to load everything from scratch every time. Caching can be quite complex to implement so this is probably one for your developer.
Basically, a fast website is good for everyone. It makes your visitors happy, makes Google happy, which helps people find your website, and makes your life easier. So, take these tips and make your website speedy!
And of course, if you have problems, I can help. Message me 😀
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