Did you know that you will lose about half of your mobile visitors if your site takes more than 5 seconds to load? That’s literally the amount of time it takes most people to read that sentence.
Once you lose those visitors, guess where they will go next? That’s right, your competition’s site. This means speed is now a massive competitive advantage.
If you’re noticing that your site’s speeds could be (or used to be) faster, you will want to ask yourself these 4 questions.
1. Who is Hosting My Site?
More specifically, did we go with the cheapest host we could find? Because poor hosting can undermine everything else you do to ensure your site is fast.
If you’re looking to switch to a new host, we invite you to follow these website hosting best practices to find a reliable provider. Switching hosts can be a bit of a pain, but it can be well worth your while to see a noticeable bump in speed and uptime.
2. When Was the Last Time We Tested Our Speeds?
A lot has probably changed since you last tested your site’s speed. Let’s say it was “only” 8 months ago. That means the backend of your site may now be holding 8 months worth of additional plugins, images and movie files.
You need to regularly test your site and be aware of everything you add. If you’re seeing a slowdown in your speeds, you should consider removing some of the plugins you’re not using, and prune any blogs that are no longer relevant.
3. Which Pages Did We Test?
You did a speed test on your home page and it was fine, which means your site is fine, right? Wrong.
This is a mistake that far too many businesses make. They only run the speed test on the home page. And a good load speed on your home page can fool you into a false sense of security. You think you’re fine, meanwhile, your most important landing pages and blogs are struggling to load.
You need to do a site-wide test to really get a 360-degree view of your site’s overall performance. This is particularly important when you consider that not all visitors will arrive on your site starting with the home page. These blogs and landing pages may be your entry point from Google’s SERPs, so you need to make sure all of your pages are loading quickly.
4. Is Our Code Too Bulky?
If you build your site using a free website building tool like Wix, your site almost certainly contains bulky code that is taking too long to load, like unnecessary characters and line breaks.
However, any site can be guilty of this. If this is the case, you can use these tools to minify your code:
- Autoptimize
- Fast Velocity Minify
Or you can have a designer or WordPress expert audit your site and help you address any excess coding that is slowing you down.
Too many people sink a lot of money into a new website instead of asking themselves what is wrong with this one. A new website would work great for a little while, but would soon be slowed down by any of the issues we mentioned above.
Ask yourself those 4 questions to save your site and your money!
Image Credits: Internet
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