The speed of your website matters for two main reasons: search engines and customers. Bottom line, fast sites rank higher on search engines and slow sites turn off customers. Do you know if your site is slow or fast and what to do about it?
Google and other search engines look at website speed as a factor in their search results. If your website is slow, they’ll move you further down the search results page. Of course, site speed isn’t the only factor search engines use to determine business rankings, but they believe that faster sites are better for their visitors.
Faster sites are better for your customers too … and for your business. Consider these stats from Akamai Technologies:
What happens to a potential customer who comes across your slow website? They go away and move on to another business.
Is Your Website Slow?
Let’s find out! Here are three free tools to check the speed of your website and a video walk-through of how to use them:
- https://gtmetrix.com
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
Each tool works differently and give you different insights into how fast your website is. The results can get pretty technical, so be sure to review the results with your developer. The most common website performance problems are:
- Skimping on your hosting. That $5.95 per month hosting sounds great, but you get what you pay for. Don’t go cheap here!
- Too many plugins (or bad plugins) on your site. These can cause big performance problems.
- Not optimizing your images. Big images take a long time to load. Your developer can give you tips on how to fix this.
- A website theme that isn’t optimized for speed.
As a local business, you rely heavily on your site to attract and retain customers. Look at these test results with your developer and fix what you can. Make sure you don’t lose customers before they even get the chance to see what you have to offer!
