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Have you experienced opening a website, but it took so long to load up that you decided to just close its browser tab or visit another website instead?
Website speed is important in supporting excellent user experience, increasing sales conversions, as well as promoting proper search engine optimization.
If you are an e-commerce website owner and you’re
According to Neil Patel, your consumers expect your website to load within 2 seconds or less before they close your tab and move on to another shop or website.
If you haven’t taken any action to increase your site speed yet, here are some reasons why you should do so now.
Top Reasons Why Website Speed is Important
1. Web users want speed.
It’s very simple. Web users expect speed when loading up websites, so you should give it to them. They will not wait forever. In fact, according to Kissmetrics.com, after 3 seconds of not opening, web users will abandon your website entirely.
Generally, when web and mobile users connect to the Internet, they look for quick answers and immediate results. Unless it’s part of extensive research or work, they normally have limited time to search for information, products, or other details they need.
Therefore, they want fast-loading websites or online shops that will provide them with what they need almost instantly.
2. Fast websites promote great user experience.
User experience refers to how your visitors “experience” your website — from the time they arrive at your homepage until they complete the actions they wish to take, I.e. purchasing a product, reading a blog, signing up, etc.
If your website loads fast, they will consider the experience as excellent and they will remember how your website helped them achieve their goal.
On the other hand, if their experience is bad, probably because of slow loading speed, web page crashes, or broken links, they will also not forget it. They will most likely not return to your website or recommend it to their friends, causing you to lose potential customers, subscribers, or buyers.
3. Slow websites affect conversions negatively.
About creating a bad user experience, a slow-loading website will drastically reduce your conversions. This is because, when your web pages don’t load as fast as they should, you are potentially losing buyers.
As mentioned above, if a website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, the
For instance, if a potential buyer is already in the shopping cart of your e-commerce website and is ready to pay, but the payment page doesn’t load properly even after a few attempts, chances are, he or she will not continue with the purchase, and will leave your site completely.
That’s a lost buyer right there!
4. Fast websites help in search engine optimization.
In ranking websites on its search results page, Google looks at different ranking factors, such as relevant content, authority, keywords, and site speed.
This means that the faster your website is, the better your chances are in getting a higher rank position on search results — of course, provided that it follows SEO best practices.
Additionally, if your website is slow loading, Google will reduce the number of crawlers it sends to your website. This means that even if you constantly update your website through new content, Google will be less likely to pick up your latest blog post if it’s loading slowly.
Ways to Increase Your WordPress Website Speed
If you are convinced about the reasons why website speed is important and you are ready to improve your site speed, here are some ways to do it as suggested by Moz.com.
- Improve your server response time. To do this, you need to resolve performance concerns, including slow routing, slow database queries, and lack of sufficient memory.
- Enable file compression and reduce the size of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files that are bigger than 150 bytes. You can use a software application called Gzip to help you with this.
- Optimize your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS codes on your WordPress website to dramatically increase your site speed. This includes removing commas, spaces, and other unnecessary characters. Using proper code formatting, as well as shortening code comments and removing unused codes can help increase speed.
- Optimize the size and quality of your images. Images with big sizes and high resolutions are usually responsible for the slow loading of web pages. When you optimize them, you can drastically increase your page speed. You can do this by using only the right size, and proper format, and compressing them for the web.
Now that you’ve learned why speed is important, you should exert an effort to improve the speed and performance of your WordPress website to attract more visitors, increase traffic, and acquire high ROI.
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