Have you ever expe­ri­enced a slow inter­net con­nec­tion that took decades to load online con­tent? Slow web­site speed is about as painful as pulling teeth and can be frus­trat­ing if you are try­ing to make purchases. 

Web­site speed can make the dif­fer­ence between a poten­tial cus­tomer get­ting the infor­ma­tion they need or mak­ing a pur­chase on your web­site or leav­ing your site and choos­ing your com­peti­tor with a faster web­site down­load. Your company’s web­site is the customer’s first impres­sion of your brand and can make or break your online suc­cess. You may be won­der­ing how fast your web­site loads, and why it even mat­ters, so let’s break that down. 

Know Your Website Speed

Google Ana­lyt­ics is the per­fect place to find out how fast your web­site is. The data can eas­i­ly be found by log­ging into Google Ana­lyt­ics and going to Site Speed Overview. This will indi­cate the length of time the aver­age user spends on your site. Anoth­er great place is Google Page Speed Insights which offers a more pre­cise indi­ca­tion of what your web­site speed is. 

In gen­er­al, Google mea­sures web­site speed on a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 being the fastest and 1 being the slow­est. If your score hap­pens to be 85, Google con­sid­ers this web­site speed as fast and high per­form­ing. Not only does Google Page Speed Insights indi­cate the web­site speed, but it also pro­vides detailed instruc­tions on how to max­i­mize it. 

We under­stand that some of these tools may be more com­plex for small busi­ness own­ers to use, but they are extreme­ly help­ful whether you are work­ing alone or with a team of experts. 

User Experience Is Key

The sim­pler the user expe­ri­ence, the more like­ly cus­tomers will stay on your web­site and shop. If your web­site speed is slow, cus­tomers will get frus­trat­ed and most like­ly will not stay on your company’s page. This indi­cates that your web­site speed has hin­dered your company’s abil­i­ty to accom­plish its goals of keep­ing the cus­tomer informed and leav­ing a pos­i­tive impression. 

Since most peo­ple are able to access the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion on their mobile devices, it is even more impor­tant that your web­site speed is able to keep the atten­tion of poten­tial customers. 

In fact, 47% of cus­tomers expect a company’s web­site to load with­in 2 sec­onds. If the web­site does not meet this require­ment, 40% of cus­tomers indi­cat­ed that they leave the web­site. A 1‑second delay can result in an 11% drop in page views.  The key is to keep the cus­tomer engaged while con­vert­ing users to leads and leads to sales.

User Experience

Page Ranks Importance

Your web­site rep­re­sents your face val­ue. How your web­site per­forms makes an impact on how your page ranks on inter­net search­es. Page rank­ings car­ry a lot of weight for Google, for both desk­top and mobile. The high­er the rank­ing on Google, the more like­ly it is that the cus­tomer will choose your site first. 

Reasons for Slow Website Speed

If you have slow web­site speed, it is in your best inter­est to know why, and how to fix it. Some caus­es of slow web­site speed include themes and plu­g­ins, web host­ing, images, and ads. 

Themes and plu­g­ins should always be up to date and sim­ple. The more com­plex they are, the more like­ly they will slow down your web­site speed. Your web host can make a huge dif­fer­ence in how fast your web­site loads. A qual­i­ty web host can great­ly improve web­site speed. 

The num­ber of images you include on your web­site can slow down your load­ing time. Com­press­ing your images will help main­tain their qual­i­ty while main­tain­ing high web­site load times. Too many ads can annoy cus­tomers and slow down web­site load­ing times. Keep only what is necessary!

Next Steps to Website Nirvana

There are var­i­ous tech­niques to improve web­site speed. Some of the more tech­ni­cal tricks include com­press­ing and merg­ing images, rear­rang­ing HTML source code, and using a con­tent deliv­ery net­work for sta­t­ic resources. To achieve a 1‑second down­load, more than one tech­nique must be applied. We at Rosy Strate­gies can help with this and much more. Our expe­ri­enced experts are hap­py to help you get your web­site in top shape. 

Give us a call, today, so we can get started!