Struggling With Slow Website Speed? Follow These 3 Fixes

Nothing hurts an online business more than slow website speed.

You may develop an amazingly attractive site, write highly engaging content, offer viewers compelling reasons to join your mailing list, and hand out attractive discounts on products, but your business might struggle to make a mark if your site is slow to load.

Why? I’m pleased you asked.

Reports shown in the infographic by Hosting Tribunal reveal that 51% of online buyers will abandon a purchase if the website is slow, and 75% of viewers will say ‘see you never again’ to a webpage that takes more than five seconds to load.

Visitors are demanding faster, more responsive websites. If you don’t provide them, they’re going to go elsewhere.

What’s Your Website Speed?

Are you wondering how fast your website is? Here’s a quick way to find out your website speed:

Visit Pingdom and enter the URL for your site. Note the Load time. Repeat the test three more times and note down the numbers.

Here’s how you might interpret the figures:

• If the average is less than 1.5 seconds, you’re looking good
• If the average is less than 2 seconds, you’re doing fine
• If the average is between 2 and 5 seconds, there’s room for improvement
• If the first page loads significantly slower than all the rest, it may be a cache kicking in. You have a small problem.
• If the tests return wildly different speeds, there’s a problem
• If the average is greater than 5 seconds, there’s a problem
• If the average is greater than eight seconds, there’s a serious problem

How Does Website Speed Affect Google Ranking?

Better speed and performance is a sign of a healthy website, this pleases customers and Google alike. Google has been striving to make the whole web fast for some time and rolled out the website Speed Update for all users on July 9th, 2018.

Google stated “People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page. Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.”

Summary: Users love fast sites and Google loves to please users.

Three Fixes to Speed up your Slow Website:

1. Combine Files

When you type a URL of a webpage in the address bar, your browser sends an HTTP request to the server hosting the site. The browser makes as many HTTP requests as there are files that need to be downloaded to load the requested web page.
Needless to say, the more files that need to be downloaded, the longer it will take to load the webpage. You can fix this by making a single file for each of these file types: CSS, HTML, and JavaScript (JS).

2. Minify Files

The size of each file that needs to be downloaded also affects page loading time. If your files are bulkier, your site will be slow.
CSS, HTML, and JS files often contain unnecessary characters such as whitespace. You can remove them to make your files lighter and improve speed.

3. Prevent JS From Loading First

Your browser loads page elements from top to bottom. However, if it encounters a JS file, it will not move to the next element until it loads it. As you can guess, this feature can delay page loading time.
To fix this issue, simply place all your JS files at the bottom so that they are loaded last.

If you’re not much of a developer, you can hire one to help you speed up your site. The investment would certainly be worth it, because, as the following infographic shows, slow website speed can hurt your business more than you can think or afford to bear.

How fast is your website?

Do you know how fast your website is? Are you concerned about your site’s speed? Did you know how much the speed of your site could impact your ability to rank well in Google? Website speed is one of the many factors we address in our SEO services

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