Don’t Let A Slow Website Hurt Your Business
Have you ever wondered why website speed matters?
Whether you do it yourself or have a webmaster do it for you, it’s important to regularly check the performance of your websites speed. You don’t have to check it daily or weekly but you should definitely check it monthly.
A performance check for website speed gives you a clearer picture of what’s happening with your website and how it’s performing. Issues that might get overlooked otherwise can be detected sooner and before they become even bigger issues for your business. If you follow your website performance over time, you can compare current performance factors over previous ones and react to them sooner.
Performance checks give you an overall grade, as well as the breakdown of the factors that negatively affect your website speed. For each element, you get a recommendation on how to fix or improve your scores.
The 3 Biggest Reasons Why Website Speed Matters
Here are 3 reasons you should check your website performance monthly.
1. A Slow Website Gives A Bad User Experience
Slow loading pages are frustrating for customers and kill conversions. Most website visitors won’t wait more than three seconds for your pages to load. In fact, most expect websites to load in less than half that time. A slow site can also damage your reputation in the eyes of your potential customer and ensure that they won’t come back and visit again in the future.
2. Page Speed Is A Ranking Factor For Google
Google has indicated site speed is a signal used by its algorithm for ranking web pages. They have also indicated that it will reduce the number of crawlers it sends to your site. A crawler is a robot or spider that visits your website and follows links from your web pages to other web pages both on your website and on other websites. This means they may index and reindex fewer of your new or updated pages.
3. Slow Websites Have Higher Bounce Rates
If someone tries to visit your website and it doesn’t load right away, they’re likely to hit the back button. No one wants to wait for a webpage to load unless they have no choice. For mobile visitors, this can have an even bigger impact. Because more and more people are surfing the internet on their phones the mobile version has to load even faster.
What You Can Do To Check Your Website Speed Right Now
Test your website speed using free tools like:
It’s as easy as entering your website URL and hitting enter. You’ll get a report of the overall performance with a list of problem areas you can address when you’re ready to tackle them.
Here is a sample of my results from a Pingdom website speed test. This is just the top of the report. There’s lots of information and suggestions for improvement. You can go into as much or as little detail as you want.
This is a sample of my results from a GTmetrix site speed test. Again, look at as much or as little as you’re comfortable with.
Also note, that the results can vary between the tools but they should reflect similar type issues. You can even get varying results from multiple tests on the same tool.
For even more help, here’s a great video that will walk you through running a GTmetrix performance test and how to analyze the results.
Have Questions About Your Website Speed?
If you’ve checked your website speed and have questions, then leave them in the comments below. Or send me a message and let’s start a conversation. I look forward to hearing from you!
