Improve Site Speed to Enhance User Experience and Close Customers
In basketball, players only have seconds to make a game winning shot. The same goes for how long a website has to win over potential customers. If your website takes longer to load than five seconds, consumers will leave immediately, taking their online search – and their money – elsewhere.
That’s why it’s essential to look at your website’s speed.
Site speed looks at how fast your website loads when someone first opens it, when they change pages or when they complete an action. It directly affects user experience on the site – people notice a website that takes longer to load. People are more likely to become a lead when the site loads quickly. They’re also more likely to become returning customers.
Additionally, site speed impacts how your website ranks on search engine results pages.
How to Find Out Your Site’s Speed
Find out your website speed by performing an audit. There are several tools you can use, both free and paid. One of the best free tools is Google PageSpeed Insights, which can help you find out the speed of your website both on desktop and mobile platforms.
Another option to find out your site speed is to rely on a team to keep you out of the weeds of site speed. Teams like those at ThreeSixty can keep you focused on running your business while they can find out your site’s speed and see how it can be lowered.
How Important is Lowering Site Speed?
While there’s no denying website speed and page load times are important, there are only some adjustments that can be made. Some websites have “additional bloat” – or added pieces of code built in that aren’t necessary – that is part of the initial design or functionality and cannot be easily removed or altered.
When it comes down to it, as long as your website doesn’t take excessively long to load, the effect on Google rankings is negligible and many online analysis scores create unrealistic expectations.
What site speed comes down to is how user experience is affected.
What Should You Do?
Make adjustments where you can, but ultimately some changes prove unnecessary when an entire website redesign would be needed. This is the equivalent of buying a house without a basement and saying "I just want to add a basement, how much would that cost?" And the reality of this example is you have to tear down the house, put in a basement and rebuild the house — much more expensive then the simple cost of a basement.
Small site speed improvements can be made while making other common search engine optimization activities.
5 Simple Ways to Improve Site Your Site’s Speed:
- Optimize images by using an image compressor tool
- Implement lazy loading for offscreen images
- Remove unnecessary videos
- Remove any extraneous styles and scripts, minify, and combine resources where possible
- Install a catching plugin to help reduce how often pages need to be rebuild
Feeling Overwhelmed?
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t worry. You don’t have to go this alone. Call in ThreeSixty to evaluate your website, help improve your site speed and give you an edge against your competition.
And for more information on improving your website’s design and making site visitors more likely to convert, check out our blog on effective web design techniques.
