The speed of your businesses website is extremely important. For starters, The User Experience of the visitors to your website starts with Page Speed. Slow websites lose traffic before it gets a chance to engage with your content. This is because 40% of website traffic bounces if a site takes over 4s to load. So, ask yourself, are you losing out on conversions down to the speed of your website? If you are not sure, test your website page speed and if it’s not looking great; below are some reasons why.
Every time someone clicks on your site, the website loads from the ground up. Therefore, it’s simple; A slow Server gives you a slow page speed. Think of it like a quarter mile drag race, your website must get up to speed from a standing start.
In most cases, this will down to your website host. Cheap hosting means that you will be sharing server space with many other websites. This means that every time a visitor accesses your site, you may be stuck in a queue with lots of other sites.
If you have ever watched a long-distance satellite interview on the news and cringed at how they struggle with the delay, well it’s the same with websites. The information must physically travel from A to B via cables and satellites. The longer the distance, the bigger the delay.
If your website’s server is based in America, yet the visitor to your site is based in the UK. The data will have to travel twice over the Atlantic, there and back. Although data is faster than your average passenger plane, it’s not made from witchcraft.
If you were alive when the tyranny of penalties brought England crashing out of World cup ’98, then you will also remember the good old days of Dial-up internet. Where images could sometimes take minutes (felt like days) to load. Things have improved, which probably couldn’t be said for the England Men’s team, but the same principles apply.
When a visitor clicks on to your website and the requests are sent to your server it starts sending all the elements that make up the website back. But, but just like the 100m at the Olympics, they all set off together, but it will take bulkier items longer to get to the finish.
The file type is also extremely important. JPG, PNG and GIF are all websites friendly, but avoid TIFF and BMP at all costs.
As we alluded to above, some elements of your website will load quicker than others. And, in most cases, the text will load quicker than images. Therefore, you should try to avoid where possible using images to display logos or using text as part of a large image.
Every element of your website requires its own file request. That means every, image, text box, social button, the lot. Add this to the fact your website’s server can only handle a certain number of requests at once, you have a potential recipe for disaster. If you have ever been on a busy motorway when it suddenly goes from three lanes down to one, you’ll know how frustrating that can be.
If you’re are using WordPress, you will more than likely make use of the extensive plugins that make keeping on top of your website easier. However, just like the content on the page, every plugin has its own file request. Try limiting the number of plugins to use to the ones that are necessary.
If you are running a Content Management System such as WordPress or Wix. You have probably been putting off making an update, just like we all do with computer updates. Well, we advise that this is the first thing you do if you want your website to be quicker. The updates usually mean that they have ironed out all the bumps and problems associated with speed.
Now that you know some of the reasons behind your slow website. Let us help you to get it flying! If you haven’t checked the speed of your website recently, simply input your URL into our checker, testmywebsitepagespeed.com to see your results.
