The speed of your website might be a strange thing for you to worry about, but it is something that can disturb any metric that is important for you. You have worked hard enough to make your site grow and made sure it is serving the right purpose. Now that the audience is engaging on a daily basis with the updates of your latest content, what if you start noticing that even with consistent efforts, you are still unable to retain user interest?
The situation may get worse if the number of visitors is decreasing along with dropping email subscriptions and the sale of your products or services. It obviously is something to worry about, but the ugly truth is that your website isn’t as popular as it used to be anymore. You have to accept the fact, and this is something that can’t be ignored. Using the website performance report, you can easily spot what the reason behind all the failure is.
Why does the website speed matter?
Website speed is of extreme importance because a fast website can increase the conversion rate. The search ranking, page views, bounce rate, visitors’ satisfaction, and even revenue is dependent upon the speed of your website.
Websites with slow speed can lead to a decrease in traffic with few results even if the speed reduces half a second. The search engine king Google and even Amazon have experienced a drop in traffic, as well as revenue, because of the delay in website speed. Like it or not, even the most popular websites have to satisfy impatient web users.
Site speed for SEO ranking
Most of us make the mistake of overlooking the website speed and prioritize other factors over it. But we need to think through the fact that if the speed of your website is not good enough to direct traffic and it takes a while to load, your visitors will move onto your competitors.
You will experience a high bounce rate, and this being an important SEO ranking factor can make your website stats suffer. This would lead you to have a low average time on your page as your audience wouldn’t bother to stay on your page till it loads completely. This would not only trouble you with the SEO success but also the conversion rates would decrease to the lowest level.
Website performance check
Today’s web users just don’t have the patience to wait when they have so many other options to explore. Similarly, with the increase in mobile users, the speed of your website is really going to matter a lot for your audience and you as well.
It is of extreme importance that you regularly check the speed of your website to make its performance consistent. Various tools can be used to govern your website and keep a better track of its performance. The timely updates and errors can be addressed using comprehensive dashboard charts.
Website speed and user experience
Search engine optimisation or SEO isn’t a scientific formula that is used to search engine performance. An efficient SEO strategy requires you to take steps and satisfy users with what they expect from you. If your users are happy with the experience you are providing them, you will eventually manage to get what you want from the search engine results too.
The crawl speed slows down with slow site speed affecting the rankings of your website. As discussed above, the speed of your website is a vital SEO ranking factor with lesser users coming to your website, which ultimately affects the indexation as well.
Prioritize the speed of your website
The conversion rates benefit with fast site speed. The online world is very competitive and call for a fast experience for the users. There are various practical steps that can be taken—and should be prioritized—according to their level of difficulty and your convenience.
Here are some steps that you can take to improve your website speed and overall user experience:
- Improve response time for server
A common method for improving the response time includes looking for a dependable web hosting service. Optimisation of the database responsible for the site’s functionality and monitoring usage of code can also come in handy. All this is categorized as IT purview and requires extra execution cost and additional decision-makers.
- Use of content distribution network
The adoption of content distribution networks is expensive and time-consuming. It requires proficiency that an average consultant or marketer might not have the ability to use. But the websites that are able to afford it must use it because Google measures the time to the first byte as one of the ranking factors and the remunerations can be massive.
- Relay reduction
Many SEOs transmit URL redirection mapping for an internal stakeholder or client for determining simple server-side redirection with JavaScript. These JavaScript redirections can be both easy or complicated. Working with the front end developer can tackle changes for the script-based relays. This can be difficult if the JS files affect the functionality of the site in some other substantial ways.
- Optimise content
Marketers at any level can install a WordPress plugin and reduce the size of the images uploaded in a section of existing or new content automatically. It does save the users a surprisingly large amount of time when all the images of the page are compressed and sized properly. It is something that can be done easily with a minimum level of difficulty to achieve a high impact.
Therefore, no matter what kind of website you are running, you have to maintain your website speed so that your customers can get easy access to your content. Even if you think you are giving the best speed possible, still try to improve and do your best. You can seek help and advice from IT consultancies, IT support services and managed services to improve your website speed because no matter what, users will always demand fast websites. So why let them go to competitors when you can retain them with some simple steps to improve website speed.
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