Why Website Speed is Important and How to Improve It

Page speed is a major factor in the performance of your website. A slow-loading page will cause visitors to leave faster than if you had an attractive site with fast content load times!

According to Google research, every second counts when it comes to page loading speed. Increasing loading times from one to three seconds increases the likelihood of the visitor leaving by 32%.

The amount of time it takes for your site to load has an incredible impact on how long people stay and navigate. For example, 90% will leave if they experience a website with longer than 5-second loading times!

The speed of a website has a significant impact on user experience, SEO, and conversion rates. Improving website performance is critical for attracting visitors and keeping them engaged. Here are some steps that you can take with your developer to make your website load faster:

How to run a website performance test

Website speed tests determine how well a website performs. Testing a website on a regular basis can help developers identify some or all of the areas that are slowing down website performance, as well as areas for improvement. There are numerous high-quality site speed tests for measuring performance, many of which are free, such as GTMetrix.com.

Google also provides PageSpeed” Insights for more in-depth performance testing while Google Chrome “DevTools” can also assist developers in evaluating the performance of their website.

How to Improve Website Speed

One of the most important factors in determining your website’s success is its speed. A slow website will not only frustrate visitors, but it can also hurt your search engine rankings and conversion rates. Fortunately, there are a number of simple steps you can take to improve your site’s speed.

Find the Best Hosting Company

One of the most important is to choose a reliable hosting provider. A good hosting provider will have the infrastructure in place to ensure that your site loads quickly and reliably. We use and recommend WPEngine and Flywheel for fast hosting and excellent support.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) (content delivery network)

In addition, you should make sure that your site’s code is clean and well-organized. This will help your site to load faster and reduce the chances of errors. Finally, you should consider using a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN stores copies of your site’s content on servers around the world, which can help to reduce loading times for visitors who are located far from your primary server. Several web hosting providers include CDN as part of their hosting packages including WPEngine and Flywheel.

How to optimize website images for speed

Image Optimization: Image files are usually the heaviest element on a website. Image optimization is the process of reducing the file size of images without sacrificing quality. This can be done by using the proper file format, adjusting image resolution, and compressing images.

Image resolution should be 72 dpi and no larger than 2000 pixels wide. Anything larger than that will reduce your page speed.

Cache your website’s pages.

Caching is one of the most effective methods for speeding up your website. Caching saves copies of your website’s files, reducing the amount of work required by the server to generate and serve a web page to a visitor’s browser. There are several methods for caching your web pages. This can be done at the server level, which means your host will handle it for you. WPEngine and Flywheel both offer excellent caching at the server level.

Summary

When it comes to website speed, there are a number of factors to consider with hosting and image size being the most important. Make sure that you resize your images to no larger than they need to be and choose a high-quality hosting company such as Flywheel or WPEngine.