Super Charging Your Site: How and Why to Improve Your Website’s Speed

When you own and run a website, you will want it to perform at its best. Otherwise, if pages load slowly or throw up errors, your visitors will experience frustration and may never return. With this in mind, here is a short guide on why and how you can improve your website speed.

Why: Google and the leading search engines look at page loading times when determining SEO results. If you are near the top of the front page, you will struggle to pass the competition if your pages load slowly. Since SEO is competitive, if you can speed up your pages slightly, you will enjoy higher SEO results. Furthermore, visitors who land on your site with a slow connection will grow frustrated when the pages load slowly. With plenty of users coming to websites with smartphones, tablets and other connections, it’s not always easy to offer an enjoyable experience if the pages render poorly.

How: Now, if you want to beat your competition and enjoy a profitable website, you need to change a few simple things. Before you do anything, you need to get a baseline speed report. You need to speed test a website before you make improvements so you know whether or not thing things you’re doing are helping. To speed up your site, resize your images and clean up any code on your site. Also, if you use WordPress, check out your plugins and remove any you don’t use or need. Then, after resizing images and checking your plugins, your programmer can pore over the code and look for any errors or issues. Once he or she fixes any errors, you can test the website and view the results. If you stack up well against the competition, you can finish the task and not worry about slow pages. If issues still occur and other sites blow yours out of the water, consider drastic measures; when taking huge steps like re-coding the pages, you will help your cause. Either way, once you speed up your site, you are well on your way to improving your business.

Site speed is an important metric for the leading search engines. At the same time, your visitors will appreciate when pages load quickly and without errors. Luckily, with a proactive approach, you can speed up your pages and watch as your visitors grow happy and your conversion rates fly.