In a time where attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter, web design is essential to the overall success of a website. It’s crucial your website’s site speed is ultra-quick. When Google crawls your site it looks at how well your website follows the best practices for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and site speed to rank it. Google will prioritise websites with a fast load speed over websites that take longer to load the content. And perhaps even more importantly, your potential customers may become sick of waiting when what they’re searching for is taking too long, eventually giving up and moving on to the next site.
Your website should be as fast as possible. Ideally, the goal for the optimal load speed should be less than 2.0 seconds. However, many factors can affect the load times including budget shared hosting, number of images or videos on the page and the number of third-party integrations the website has, for example Facebook Pixel or CRM integrations.
For pages that take more than 4 seconds to load, the probability of bounce increases to 90% – how drastic! Recent studies have shown that the average website loads in 3.21 seconds. This really demonstrates that no matter how well you market your products and your brand, it all comes down to your site speed.
So now you’re thinking…‘how do I find this data about my website and how do I go about improving it?’ Keep reading to find out.
1. How to test your site speed?
A great tool to test your website’s speed is Pingdom Tools. Simply type in your URL and it will churn out a report with recommendations for you. How easy is that! Alternatively, you can also use Google Search Console’s Speed Reports located under the Enhancements Tab.
2. How to improve your site speed?
Improving your site speed doesn’t have to be complicated. Incorporate these little habits every time you add new content to your web design, and you will have an optimised website that will be easy to crawl and rank. Below are just some of many tips to easily and quickly improve your site’s speed.
Optimisations you can do yourself:
Optimise Images
Optimise images by not making them larger than they need to be for your web design. Use them in the correct format (PNG if your graphics contain transparency and JPEG for photos) and compress them without losing quality for the web. Photoshop is a great tool to compress images, however, if you don’t have access to the Adobe suite, there are plenty of free tools available to resize and compress your photos, such as Tiny PNG.
Clean up your database
Having a database cluttered with drafts, post revisions, and deactivated plugins can seriously increase the load time of your pages. The plugin WP Optimise is great for systematically clearing anything you don’t need that takes up unnecessary space.
Switch off plugins you don’t use
Plugins tend to be the primary reason websites load at a slower speed. So any plugins you don’t use or that are no longer essential, you can delete.
Use a good theme or plugin
When you’re setting up a website, it’s best to start with good foundations. Find a good host, a content distribution network (CDN) and a great theme or plugin to reduce lots of site speed issues. Sometimes the most beautiful sites perform the worst SEO wise.
3. Get Help – Optimisations Chilli can help with.
Unfortunately, some things are a tad more complicated, but that’s where we can step in and take charge. Our team of experienced web developers can easily optimise your website in a variety of areas. Some general optimisations we carry out on website maintenance include compressing files, minifying CSS, JavaScript and HTML, as well as leveraging browser caching just to name a few.
If you’re looking for an agency that specialises in web design on the Sunshine Coast, to improve your website’s speed but you’re not quite sure how to do it or don’t have the time, then contact our friendly team of intelligent creatives to see how we can help you!
