Are you wondering why the speed of your website is so important? Or is there any impact of a slow website on sales? If you’re seeking answers to these questions, here you’ll find out why website speed is crucial and how you can fix a slow website.
Website speed is the time taken by your web page to load once a user clicks on the site link. For businesses, a website plays a significant role in determining the online success of the company. But simply having a business website is not enough. So, what impact does a slow website have on sales?
Importance of Website Speed
These days, no one likes to wait! According to a survey, more than 48% of consumers expect a website to load in 2 seconds. Not just this, if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, around 40% of users tend to leave it. The page download speed is the first important thing in delivering a good website experience to your visitors.
The website speed or the page download speed impact your site’s performance and your overall business objectives. This is because if your website speed is slow, then the majority of users will leave your website and visit a competitor’s instead.
Moreover, not only users want high speed but also Google demands it. Google, the leading search engine, has made it clear that site speed is a major ranking factor. Also, with an increase in mobile searches, Google has also announced mobile-first indexing. With this, the speed of your website’s mobile version has now become a priority.
If your website has a slow load speed, it would slide down the ranks. On the other hand, the lightning-fast sites will get a higher ranking which translates into greater visibility, traffic, conversions, and revenue. This means your website speed impacts your lead generation and conversion.
How to Speed Up Your Website?
Now as you know why website speed is important, let’s move to the next big question. How you can speed up your website? If you’re looking to improve your site speed, you need to adjust a few things. Here are some important things that will help you in speeding up your website.
Page Speed Tests
The first step is measuring the current speed of your site by using tools like WebPageTest, GTmetrix, and Mobile-Friendly Test. With the help of a speed test, you will find out how fast your website is currently loading.
Caching Your Website
When a user visits your website, a copy of your website gets stored in a computer for easy access later. When this user will again visit your website, the browser will load the cache, rather than loading every single file from the server. This is a website cache that helps in improving your site speed.
Image Optimization
As you might know, larger images take up more space and a longer time to load. For this, it’s necessary to optimize the images by reducing the file size of images and compressing them. You need to achieve a page size of around 1.5-6mb of data.
Improve Hosting
Often even after making all efforts, you fail to achieve desired results. This happens because of inferior hosting that has a lot of sites cramped in the same server. So, make sure to upgrade your hosting to get lightning speed for your website.