Losing website traffic due to slow speed? Time to optimise your website speed and keep the traffic flowing.
Here are a few tips to optimise your website speed:
First, test the speed of your site. Move on to optimisation only after you gauge its performance. There are automated tools like Lighthouse, which give you a detailed analysis of what are the weak points on your site and where you can improve. Google’s PageSpeed too is a tool which gives you site a ranking out of 100, thereby helping you realize how much you need to boost your site performance.
Images are one of the biggest culprits; they not only eat up space but also take half of the site’s memory load. Optimise your image by using tools like Adobe Photoshop or even simpler tools like Cloudinary or FileOptimizer. Consider automating your image optimizer if you regularly use images alongside your content.
Research shows that 40% people abandon sites due to lack of speed. Extra load time of just a few seconds can cost companies billions of dollars. Optimisation of the speed of your site will not only improve your ranking but will also enhance your conversion rates once a user enters your site.
Smartphones are the new rulers. Please them and you please the world! 60% of people’s media time is spent on phones. Optimising your site for the phone platform will keep you in business, else it will have a bad impact on your conversion rates. The main reason for companies not to optimise for mobiles is lack of affordability. But there are many solutions like Shopify & WordPress, which give you a wide range of responsive themes that are compatible with a variety of screen sizes & devices. Google also has a free tool to test how well your site performs on mobiles. Another most commonly used option is creating an app.
Site speed is also one of the many reasons as to why you could be ranked higher in Google’s search results. It could help increase organic traffic to your site. Beware though, there is much more to SEO than the site speed, like, high-quality images & content, relevance, keyword-optimized content. Site speed is just one of the many factors that help in SEO. The main gain from optimised site speed is conversion rates.
