Optimization to improve your Website speed is not a fad!

Do you know of anyone who loves slow websites?
I don’t!
The main issue here is that 99% of business owners either don’t know what to do or don’t think it is an important issue.
Many owners of small businesses have had a painful experience with the creation of their website, and they are not ready to touch it again! They are just getting by and only post the odd blog post, change an image, or add an event and call it a day!

Why do you have a website?

Sounds like a rhetorical question right?? But you would not believe how many people don’t actually have a goal for their website. And life had taught us that if you are not planning, you are planning to fail!
A website can be one of the greatest tools you have in your marketing, branding, and customer service arsenal – if done right of course.
This is “The greatest” tool and the only one where you have full control! You don’t have the same control over social media, Google or anything else in the world digital marketing.
Problem is, it is usually underused and underrated! People spend a lot of money (or a lot of time and effort), to have a “good” website without defining “good”!

So let’s look at what good means, check the below statements and record how many apply to your own website:

1. A website that looks good and is ascetically pleasing (portrays a good brand, has good graphics, design, etc.)
2. A website that provides a good “user experience” (easy to navigate, has unique and useful content, helps people “find” the information they are looking for, etc.)
3. A website that “converts” (works for you as well as for your user/prospect customer, provides a useful service to them and provides you with leads and prospect customers)
4. A website that is “functional” (loads quickly, works seamlessly, allows the user to get in touch with you with 1 click, data/information goes where it needs to be, like your CRM system, mailing list etc. and if we are talking about an e-commerce store then the goal here is pleasing and seamless purchasing experience)

This above list is not exhaustive but it is a good start to get you to think about setting goals for your website, this way you can measure and improve.
The majority of website designers and business owners nail No.1 “ascetically pleasing” without a hitch, and have various percentages of success with No.2 “user experience” – although it is an ongoing process.

But what about No.3 and 4? A Website that is functional and converts?

Isn’t this why you wanted to have a website in the first place? To get more customers? Sell More? Grow the business?

• How can you do that if your website visitors and users are not given the chance to engage with you because the website speed (the page loading speed) is too slow? No one likes to wait.
• You are actually losing so many prospect customers & business opportunities for this reason alone.
  It is like having an unmanned phone number that sends the callers to a waiting pattern, or a shop that has a tiny door that only allows one person at a time, is that a good business practice?
• You also gotta think about the effort and/or money you spend on SEO and advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media networks, these could be working great attracting people to visit your website only for these people to bounce off right away!
  (To do Exercise: go to your Google analytics and check the bounce rate, a good bounce rate should be less than 40%, ideally 30% or less)

Ignore Google website speed/page-speed results and you’ll pay dearly!

Google has a new calculator that shows you the current speed of your page-loading for the homepage (you could also test any other internal page if you like) here’s the link: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-ca/feature/testmysite/

1. Enter the URL you want to test and wait a few seconds for the test to complete.
2. The second section will show you some website optimization suggestions and gives you an option to enter your email and receive a full report, it is a good idea to get that report and forward it to your web developer, this report is quite a techie one
   (P.S: If you don’t have one, contact us we’re happy to help)
3. Scroll down and you’ll see 2 more links: Benchmark industry leaders and Evaluate the impact of a faster site, the benchmark is for you to benchmark your website against a leader in your industry for example: if you are an e-commerce store maybe you want to benchmark against Amazon, or Bestbuy or eBay Maybe?
4. Where it gets really exciting is the Evaluate the impact of a faster site, this has a dynamic calculator that will show you how much money you can make if you do your website optimization correctly to improve your website speed on mobile! (Which is also how much money you are losing right now because of your slow loading site!)

Anything more than 2.5 seconds of page load time and you will be heavily penalized in Google’s SEO ranking and slapped with a much heavier loss: Revenue!

How can I improve my website speed, YOU ASK?

Improving a WordPress page loading speed is a really delicate science because you always need to strike a fine balance between speed and visual design, also most of it happens in the back-end and needs experience, this is what we call “website plumbing”:

• Go crazy with website optimization and the aesthetics will suffer! Some plugins and settings can easily break your website.
• Fill your page with large but great-looking full-width-images (those look really cool) and if you don’t optimize them you’ll lose more than 70% of your prospects who got bored of waiting for the page to load!  Balance is KEY!

Next Steps:

1. Use the report you got from https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-ca/feature/testmysite/ as a baseline and start with those recommended optimizations (some good caching plugins like Hummingbird, Wp-rocket, and Litespeed cache, can help you with some of the tasks that you need to complete) The first place to start is resizing and compressing all images.
2. If you need an experienced person to take care of it for you, here’s what we offer:  “WordPress performance speed & website Optimization package ” this will speed up your website by up to an extra 80% (OR MORE)

Wishing you success.
Amr – The Internet Guy!