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Website speed, does it really matter?
Website speed, does it really matter?
A website has just seconds to capture a visitors attention, seconds to get its message across, seconds before they’re gone forever, not much time is it! Your visitors don’t want to be hanging around for pages to load, they want access to your website straight away and this is even more important to mobile phone users who are often on slower connections.
To be an effective marketing tool, a website needs to draw the visitor in, it needs to grab their attention visually and have a clear Call to Action right at the top. That’s why we create amazing websites that are intuitive and easy to navigate guiding visitors seamlessly through the content, maximising the chances that they’ll call, contact, click or buy. We also check our websites out every so often to make sure they are performing at their best using some of the tools you’ll find below.
Our strategy for making that perfect first impression is quite simple, it starts with questions, lots of questions, it’s the only way we can understand your business.
“The slower your sites load, the more visitors and revenue you’ll lose out on. Faster loading pages lead to a better overall website experience, hence Google’s move toward making it a mobile ranking factor.”
But what can you do to improve the speed of your website?
Luckily there are a few tools and tips you can use to help speed things up, just like a car engine your website will probably need some fine-tuning…
Start with Diagnostic Tools:-
- Google Page Speed Insights is a great place to start, it’s free and will probably point out the basic issues on your website.
- GT Metrix, one of our favourite tools for checking site speeds, and finding those all-important fixes.
- Pingdom Tools, we sometimes use this if we are making no progress.
- Web Page Test, another option you might find useful.
The important thing here is to find a tool you like and stick with it so you start to see consistency in your results.
Web Hosting:-
Now you’ve got some facts and figures to work with you will probably see a few issues pointing at your web hosting so now might be a good tie to look at what your current hosting provider is offering and maybe consider moving. Our websites load in around 2 to 3 seconds but we know they would be much slower on different servers, faster servers allow us to do more with our websites.
Other things to consider:-
It’s no secret that we use WordPress as our base Content Management System and we know if you’re not careful it can get very slow so here are a few things you might want to try on your own website.
- Use small images, not so easy in this day of full-screen websites but try to avoid using massive images and always crop them to size, there is a massive image size difference between a 2000 pixel wide image and an image at 1800 pixels wide.
- Use image compression, so once you’ve got your images to size, use a compression utility to make the files smaller, Gzip compression on your server is the starting point.
- Images on mobiles, try and use a correctly sized image for your mobile version as well, you don’t want to load an 1800 pixel wide image when 800 pixels would be fine.
- Caching, make sure your server is caching your website for you, you can check this using something like GT Metrix.
- Use a CDN (Client Delivery Network) to deliver your website, this will make your site load faster and cut down the requirements of your web server, you can read about some CDN options here.
Hopefully, these suggestions might give you some ideas on how you can make your website run a little faster, of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg and we do a lot more to websites we design and deliver, if you would like to find out more why not get in touch.
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