Why do you need a fast website?
Have you been noticing dropping traffic to your website with great distress? Are you always passionate about your content and offer something enriching to your visitors? Then it must be even more baffling, why your email subscription lists are not swelling and that you largely see bounces in your analytics report! The problem could lie elsewhere, and it can be very dangerous if you don’t look into it right away. You are not only losing current and potential visitors, you are losing some serious revenue in the process!
How do you know if your website is slow?
Now this is a very important question to ask. If you are following your site’s analytics statistics through Google Analytics, use Google Analytics’ Site Speed report! If your site takes less than 4 seconds to load, you are doing fine. Remember, however, that lower is better. Anything that is over 4 seconds is cause for concern, and you need to look at ways to get that lower.
Studies from Aberdeen Group say that every extra second of load time reduces your website conversions by 7%.
Why do high Page Load times affect your website?
Well, all your wonderful content and graphics are not really seen if your website takes a lot of time to load and often that time is just 4 seconds. With immense internet content out there, people are looking for speed. You have to be quick to catch their attention. And often they will not wait around for your site to load. Since Google takes load times into account, you will find your website rankings diminishing and your organic ratings plummeting. Also imagine if your site is very slow and takes forever for the payment to go through, your customer will not come back again to buy. So yes, it hurts in every which way to have a slow loading website.
Handy tips to make your website load faster:
1. Graphics: Image files are usually large. Check if, they are slowing down your website. Do away with any unnecessary images that may slow down your website and compress the others to suitable web sizes. Try to achieve a quality – size balance, every time you upload an image!
2. Plugins and widgets: Some plugins may be heavy and may seriously pull down your website. Take a quick look at all the plugins you have. Remove any that are not used or activated. If you find two or more similar plugins, it is better to get rid of the excess.
3. Clean Database: WordPress does tend to keep each old version of your post. Over a period of time, these may accumulate eating up a lot of space. It is better to use a plugin that helps you clean up your database and keeps it in optimum health.
4. Advertisements: As tempting as the option of having advertisements on your site is, do not overdo it. Some of them can take a lot of time to load. Always keep a track of what your revenues are and feel free to remove a few non-performing ones.
5. Super Cache: WP Super Cache is a great plugin to reduce load time. It helps save static pages of your website on your server. So every time when your website loads, it does not need to access the database thus reducing the load time.
In summary, it really is very crucial to have a fast website. Keep a tab on your host’s servers so that their sluggish speeds do not pull down your website. Keep trying out new features but always monitor and dump those that are really slowing you down. Stay conscious of your website load times and use tools to monitor your page load speeds regularly! It will bode well for your website and your business!
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