Site’s Speed
When you are a business owner with a website too, you have a lot of things to do. Learning how to speed up WordPress load times might not be on the agenda, but it should be. More and more people are noticing when sites are too slow. With the lightning fast internet, everyone wants your site to be just as fast. There are many things that could affect your site’s speed.
One of the big things that could hurt your WordPress site is being on a hosting plan that is too low for your site. If you need to service thousands of visitors and still keep your site fast, you might need to upgrade to a VPS or a dedicated server vs sticking with low performing shared servers. You could be sharing a server with literally thousands of people and you don’t know what they have on their sites. Anything could be slowing you down. When you have a VPS or a dedicated server, it is much easier for you to make sure that your server is not bogged down.
If you have a lot of plugins on your WordPress site, this is another surefire way to slow your website down. You should only have plugins that are essential to your site’s function. If you have other plugins that you picked up and don’t use anymore, you should let them go. Sometimes these plugins are not updated and their faulty codes could give your WordPress site major problems.
Other technical issues could be causing your site problems as well so make sure that you do a free check of your website to figure out what is wrong and get it fixed.
Increase Visitor Retention:
When you have a fast site, your visitor can easily click around from page to page and view other topics that interest them. If your site is very slow and they can’t get to the other pages without waiting for a long time, they are going to go find another site that will serve their needs faster.
When you are able to retain visitors, that means more time to convert them into paying customers. If someone has already clicked away from your site then you’ve lost the opportunity to have them opt-in, become a lead, request more information or any other action you want them to take. If your site isn’t loading under 3 seconds, you have lost most people.
SEO Benefits:
Everyone knows they need to have great SEO, but not everyone understands what it is or how it works and how does speed give you SEO benefits?
SEO (which means search engine optimization for you newbies out there) is the process of showing search engines that you are the best result to put in first place.
You have to know what Google thinks is the first place worthy before you start trying to optimize. The first thing you need to know is that Google wants results that make their searchers happy. This means quick sites with great information. This is why fast sites are coming out on top of the search engine results pages.
If you leave your website at its current slow loading speed, you are costing yourself higher search engine rankings if you have great content that Google would love to share. Give yourself the best opportunity to be found by speeding up your WordPress site.
Higher Conversions:
When your site is speedy and people are able to get around to find the information that they need to make their decision, you are going to convert much higher. We find that people not only find slow websites annoying, but they do not trust them as much as fast sites. Fast sites make you think of on-point operations while slow sites make you think full of spam and worrisome.
You don’t have to put a lot of information or images on a page to increase the conversion rate. Sometimes less is more when you are building a website.
Bounce Rate:
If you bounce away from slow sites, your visitors are going to do the same. If a site starts to load slow, you immediately think that the internet is messed up or something has gone awry, so you click back on your browser. This means that you bounced off the page. When you get a bounce (click and straight back) on your page, this is not a good signal to Google and the other search engines. When people surf through multiple pages of your site, this is a good signal.
Reader Satisfaction:
Having a zippy quick site helps with reader satisfaction. When you want information, you want it fast. That is why you go to the internet instead of going down the road to the library. If your site makes people wish they would have taken the drive, you need to speed it up.
If you can offer a great user experience with a bunch of add-ons that slow down your site, taking some of the extras off your site might be the best thing for you to do.
Conclusion:
Whether you choose to work on optimizing your site’s speed on your own or you want to have a professional take care of it, something needs to change if you have a slow site. There is no reason to lose valuable customer relationships to your competition when there are solutions at your fingertips.
Was this article helpful and informative? Leave us a comment with your thoughts, and if you have any tips for speeding up website load times, leave them in the comments section below.