Don’t lose your visitors! – Speed up your website

You have probably noticed it yourself when you are waiting for a website to load. The page is coming, and coming, and coming, and then you say to yourself – “I have better things to do!” (I use more swear words, but that is just me). After losing your patience, you leave the site! Onwards and upwards. Time to find a website the loads faster than a sloth with a serious hangover.

So, you know that fast websites are important. Your users know that fast websites matter. They don’t wait. But what is even more interesting is that Google knows page speed counts too. To quote Senior Google directly:

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed…we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies.

So if you are not convinced that keeping your visitors happy is important, then you certainly know that you have to keep Google happy. It affects your search ranking. And I have heard that they are sending some guys around to your place to make sure you get the message! But seriously, speed wins. Accept it.

Page load speed factors

I thought I would include an amazing infographic from Kissmetrics (yes they make some pretty cool infographics) to help illustrate my point about page load times. However, to summarize the infographic and to help those who either can’t be bothered reading it or can’t (shout out to Max), I have highlighted the important points below:

• Every Second Counts: Slow load time increases abandon rate
• Mobile vs Desktop: Users are starting to expect equal or better speeds on their mobile
• Mobile load times: Many users seem prepared to wait 6-10 seconds on mobile
• Mobile problems: More than half of users have experienced issues browsing on mobiles
• Longer page loads: 1 second increase in page load time can increase abandonment up to 7%

Summary

In essence, what does all of this information tell us. Well, in my opinion this infographic gets a little off topic, but the result is that it illustrates two major points:

1. Page load times matter and affect your sales (due to page abandonment)
2. Mobile is becoming increasingly important and load times there are an even bigger issue

What can you do about that (apart from signing up to my website and getting my truly unbeatable tips)?

• Consider everything that you add to your website (don’t go crazy with graphics, videos, plugins, etc)
• Monitor your page load speed via many of the sites that are available

IF you really want to take some action today, here is a couple of posts I have written on the topic:

• Speeding up your page load by fixing your images.
• Analyze your plugins and improve your page load times

I have since used some other techniques and ideas for this kind of thing, but I keep those just for my subscribers!
photo credit: andres.thor via photopin cc