In modern days, a slow website is a killer. In fact, a slow website is costing you money! Especially for those of you who are operating an online business.
In its infancy stage, your website platform is optimized for speed. But as time goes by, you’ll probably experience a slower load time.
This happens because you’re building your website as you progress.
Images are being added, along with additional codes from the use of plugins for specific functions.
The speed of your website can affect your online income because people just don’t have as much time to wait around anymore.
The expectation is far higher than back in the days (here are 7-page speed stats every marketer should know).
If your competition has a faster loading website, you’ll likely lose business to them. And that’s why a slow website is costing you money.
With that being said, I’m going to further explain the benefits of having a faster loading website as well as ways to speed things up.
Benefits Of Having A Faster Loading Website
Advantage #1. Improves Search Engine Optimization: Search engines index your page by sending out the crawl spiders to collect information.
If your page takes too long to load, it will also slow down the spiders which results in a lower ranking. A slow website tells Google that your website will likely provide a poor user experience.
Advantage #2. Your Visitor Retention Rate Will Increase: What is tolerable in your opinion when it comes to waiting for a website to load?
I’m a very impatient person and I will leave quickly if the website takes forever to load. This means, even if you have amazing content, people will not actually see if it takes forever to get to it.
Advantage #3. An Increase In Returning Visitors: Your website is the first impression for your visitors. A slow website usually gives off a bad impression. After all, a quality website will certainly load at lightning speed.
Advantage #4. An Increases In Your Overall Revenue: With a faster loading website, you should have no problem achieving higher ranks. This results in more organic traffic, more clicks, and more potential sales.
How To Fix Your Slow Website: Run A Speed Test
Step #1: Visit Google PageSpeed Insight to run a speed test on your web page.
Step #2: Enter your website URL and click analyze. The test should take less than a minute.
Keep in mind:
- You will receive 2 scores, one for desktop and the other for mobile devices. Don’t be surprised if the scores are totally different.
- If your website has multiple pages, it will vary from page to page, so make sure you run each page separately.
- You will be provided with recommendations to improve your speed score!
- You can also improve your website’s PageSpeed by following my provided methods below!
Understanding The Difference Between A Good And A Bad Score
The scoring system is quite simple; it rates your website on a scale of 0-100.
However, if you get a score of 100, your page is probably the fastest possible!
This is very hard to achieve but should be a goal for all online business owners.
Your score results will be in 3 available colors: RED, YELLOW, and GREEN.
Red means danger, yellow means caution, and green means good. However, don’t let the colors discourage you, but more of a motivation to improve your website. Did you know that not all red scores are considered bad?
If you received a score of 50 or higher, it means your website will still load for your visitors, but not as fast as most of your competitors.
In my opinion, anything below 50, you must take action immediately otherwise it can really affect your viewer’s experience.
Common Reasons For Having A Slow Website
Reason #1. Your Images Are Not Compressed: This can result in longer page load times. This is not uncommon and I have the perfect solution for you down below.
Reason #2. Your Web Host Is Not Worth The Money: You do get what you pay for, so if you are currently paying for web hosting from an uncommon provider. You might want to reconsider and look elsewhere.
Reason #3. Content Overload: Unfortunately, as someone who runs a blog. Content is a must. The problem with having too much content is the limitation of space on your web host.
If it comes down to this, you should consider going with a better provider or upgrading your service package.
Reason #4. Your Website Theme Is Not Mobile-friendly: Mobile devices have revolutionized how people access the internet.
With smartphones readily available to most people, it’s no surprise that many internet users use their phones to browse the web.
However, not every website theme is optimized for mobile devices. So it’s crucial to double-check to ensure that it is.
Speed Up Your Website With 4 Easy Methods
Method #1: Install a plugin that compresses your images automatically! Personally, I use WordPress, so I will talk about a plugin that works well with WordPress.
If you’re using a different platform, you can google search image compression plugin for your specific platform.
If you are using WordPress like me, you need to head over to your AdminCP right now, install, and activate EWWW Image Optimizer.
Once you have installed and activated EWWW Image Optimizer, you’ll want to open it and click on the bulk optimize tool. Depends on how many images are on your website, it can take a few minutes to complete the process. Afterward, any new images you upload to your website will be automatically compressed.
Method #2: Choosing a theme that is mobile-friendly. I don’t recommend changing your theme too often because that can affect your scoring on search engines.
However, if you are brand new, you should invest some time into choosing the right theme before adding content.
Method #3: Invest in a caching tool. For those of you who are operating a WordPress website. It doesn’t hurt to get yourself a cache plugin like WP Rocket.
Method #4: Host your WordPress website on Wealthy Affiliate. A feature known as SiteSpeed is available to people who host their WordPress website on Wealthy Affiliate.
It is a fully automated feature and can be applied with a simple click of a button.
Besides, SiteSpeed, you will also receive FREE Site SSL and SiteSpam which would normally cost you at least $100.00 in addition to your regular website hosting.
Out of these 3 options, the last one will cost you a monthly payment of $49.00, but it includes services like SiteSpeed, SiteSpam, Free SSL for a lifetime, which would normally cost you a lot more elsewhere.
Wealthy Affiliate also provides you with training courses, community support, webinars, classes, boot camp courses, host up to 50 websites, keyword and niche research tool, and much more from Wealthy Affiliate.
This all comes in at one price with no additional charges.
Even though the free methods are great, nothing beats the price and value you get with Wealthy Affiliate. If you are really serious about your online business. Wealthy Affiliate is highly recommended.
My Final Thoughts
By now, you should know how to identify the common reasons why your website is running slow.
You should also know how to analyze your website through Google PageSpeed Insight and how to optimize your website for better performance.
There are many websites on the internet and chances are thousands are related to your niche.
This means the competition is fierce, so investing in yourself, your website to make your website stand out from the crowd will help you grow your online business in the long run.
Google and other search engines value customer experience because that is how they make money.
They wouldn’t want to put a slow website on their top pages because that would impact their customer satisfaction.
If you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to ask by leaving a comment down below. I’ll try my best to help you out.
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