You’ve probably heard the news about website speed, user experience and conversions. I wrote another post about it, along with instructions on how to solve some common problems.
That post is more focused on WordPress, but the same rules apply for any site. Here are some of the scary stats:
- A one second delay in web page load time can result in a 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
- 1 in 4 people will abandon a website that takes more than four seconds to load
- The ideal load time for a web page is two seconds or less
In other words, you ignore website speed at your peril. And let’s be honest, there’s more than enough peril in the world right now.
Fortunately, figuring out if your website is up to snuff speed-wise is easy and should only take you a minute or so. Fixing potential problems is another story, but one step at a time.
The one minute (or less) website speed test:
- Go to gtmetrix.com (my favorite speed testing app)
- Enter the url of the website you want to test
- Bang that “Analyze” button
- Kick back and let it do it’s thing
How’d you do? Two seconds or less? PageSpeed score over 90%? If so, congratulations. While there might still be room for improvement, that’s a very respectable result.
If your results are worse than that, maybe much worse, don’t despair. Many problems have easy fixes, and many others will just require changing some code, optimizing images or caching.
Or, your slow website could be the result of using sub par website hosting. I’ve been using WPX Hosting for years. I think they’re the best WordPress hosting currently available.