How Important is Website Speed?
Just 15% of Websites Load at an Acceptable Speed
In my survey of 200 Puget Sound small and medium-sized business websites, I found that the vast majority took more than five seconds to load. That’s Google’s penalization threshold for landing page speed. Almost 100 of the tested websites took between 6-10 seconds to load – double Google’s recommended speed.
37% of Potential Customers Leave if Your Site Takes Longer than 5 Seconds to Load
According to Pingdom, your visitors probably hold your website to a higher standard than Google does. Bounce rates are below 10% for websites that load within three seconds. The bounce rate rises to 24% for a four-second load time and 38% for a five-second load time.
70% of Potential Customers are Influenced Negatively by Slow Websites
Beyond data that tracks actual user behavior, you should rely on customer surveys to understand the relationship between page load speed and sales rates. Data shared by Search Engine Journal found that almost 70% of customers (out of 750 surveyed) say that a slow website negatively affects their decision to buy.
Conversion Rates Drop by at Least 7% for Every Second of Load Time
Slow page speed will negatively impact your bottom line. According to a report by Small SEO Tools and Strangeloop, each second in page load time will drop your conversion rate by 7%. This means that if your website drives $1,000 per day in sales, you could lose $25,000 per year in lost revenue for each second your website takes to load. Looking at it another way, out of 100 potential customers, you will automatically lose 7 of them for each extra second.
Page Speed Impacts Your Search Engine Ranking
While business owners certainly care about their potential customers’ experience on their website, many also want to reap the SEO benefits that come with a fast website. In summer 2018, Google started making page speed a ranking factor for SEO.
In an article for Social Media Explorer, Adam Torkildson highlighted how three out of the top four factors for Google rankings fall under the category of site speed. The main factors that Google looks at are time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate. Having a fast loading website will significantly improve all 3 of these critical metrics.
Here’s How You Fix Your Slow Website
I offer a simple, and low-cost service designed to give you the fastest, most secure, and most reliable website possible.
Here’s what’s included in my Enterprise Website Optimization Service:
- Lighting fast website hosting on the fastest servers on the market (confirmed by multiple tests).
- Website optimization suite, guaranteed to make your site load in less than two seconds.
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) implementation. Provides instant website loading for mobile visitors.
- 24/7 website monitoring with instant notifications if there is ever a problem.
- Routine website maintenance to ensure your site stays up to date with modern web standards.
- Full website security suite, ensuring your site will never be hacked or disrupted by internet pirates or bots.
- Weekly backups, delivered to your email inbox, ensuring you will never lose data, even in the event of a natural disaster.
- Full money-back guarantee if you aren’t completely blown away by the results.
- No hidden fees.
- Price: $499 per year, or $49.99 per month.
- Fast, easy, and free setup.
- Cancel any time.
Because of the intensive nature of this service, we can only provide it to a limited number of clients. We only market this service when we have openings, and they always fill up fast. Claim your spot now. We guarantee your website will load faster than your competitors, you will win more business, and rank higher in search results.
Want to do it yourself?
I like your spirit! Here are 5 quick tips to get your WordPress site running faster.
1.) Check your server response times. Use google pagespeed to evaluate your server response time. If it’s longer than two seconds, you should definitely consider upgrading your hosting provider or performing some intensive server maintenance.
2.) Serve your images in webp format. Webp image conversion can reduce your image file sizes by up to 90%. Doing this will drastically speed up your site. There are a number of WordPress plugins that will do this for you, but this one is my favorite.
3.) Clean your database. A messy database can drastically slow down your WordPress site. There are plenty of plugins out there that claim to clean your database, but manual database maintenance is my favorite option. harge.
4.) Setup Your Cache Correctly. Caching the filesthat comprise your website can speed up your site. However, caching isn’t as simple as most people think. Plenty of the most popular cache plugins out there actually slow down your site by increasing database load. The truth is that most caching plugins need to be uniquely configured for each unique website.
5.) Minify and combine your Javascript, HTML, and CSS. Minification and combination of website files can drastically speed up your site by reducing the quantity and size of files needed to display your site. Be careful though, because this can break your site if configured incorrectly. If you want to use a plugin to help you with this, I recommend this one.
~Alex Bonesteel