It can make or break an experience. You visit a site on a regular basis. It doesn’t even occur to you that it should be loading on specific speeds. Then one day, it just halts. It doesn’t load. You click and you click and you click. Nothing happens. Website speed. It can be a total game changer.
Why Should You Care About Website Speed?
Yarra Web is tapping into this trend. Because there’s a whole science behind it. And there are a whole lot of benefits behind it. Here are a few:
Better optimization on mobile
We’re far more impatient on mobile. In fact, teens (a prime target demographic) spend almost a third of their day on mobile, like tablet devices and cell phones. If a site doesn’t load fast enough, they’re gone. They’re done with it and on to the next thing. This means that your site is missing tons of conversions, just because the Web speed is off.
Higher Google rankings
The aforementioned challenge ties directly into this one. Think about it – if you leave a site within a certain, very succinct time frame, it won’t help it’s Google rankings, In fact, it will minimise them. Dependent on where in the world you’re selling your products, and where your business is located, this can be a total game changer.
Best possible user experience
The most important component of any strategy is that you’re thinking through the needs and wants of your audience. Web strategy these days can focus on two objectives – either sharing information that your audience will appreciate or asking them to do something with a call to action (CTA). There are many easy wins in this space, for example- your CTA could be pointing visitors to yet another area of your site or even your social media platforms.
Sold? Okay, good. We’ve got lots of next steps, including invaluable tools that will take the design of your Website and more specifically and importantly, the speed to the next level.
Tools for Analysing Website Speed
Pingdom, a performance monitoring service, offers a Website Speed Test that couldn’t be easier to use. All you do is type in the URL of your site, included where you’re located, and off you go. The results returned will help explain how fast your site is, where potential bottlenecks may be and what you can do to mitigate these.
Google also offers its own solution. The PageSpeed tool is Google’s solution to ensure that your site loads as fast as possible. You can run the module on both Apache and Nginx servers. What’s their purpose? They both rewrite AND optimize all of the resources on your site. You can speed up your Website with Google DNS. Google DNS is a Domain Name System that is offered free of charge. It helps determine what domain names will contribute to the highest traffic to your site.
Two Very Quick Tips
Now that you know the basics, here are two very quick tips for getting the most bang for buck in website speed improvements:
- Image size- Huge images are beautiful, but they also mean that your site won’t load quite as fast as you like. Make sure your images are correctly sized and saved for Web in Photoshop before you upload them to your site.
- Web hosts– You can cut your page speed loading time by more than half by hosting your Website with a decent Web hosting company, and yes, that means your standard $3 per month web host won’t cut it. Find one that specialises in the technology your website is built with; For example, there are hosts that specialise in hosting WordPress websites.