If you are reading this, you are probably a business owner. You’ve taken the time to find a market you’re passionate about – and, maybe more importantly, a market that is hungry for something you are able to offer. You’ve also put a lot of effort into to building a fantastic product or service so that you can build a real business and not a one hit wonder.
Perhaps at one point you hired a web designer to put together a clean, modern, and easy to navigate website tailored to your visitors, with a real focus on conversion.
The only problem is you’re not making any sales…
We see it every day. People in the northeastern Florida region contact us because their sites are invisible online…they don’t appear for valuable search terms, and they have no idea why.
That is, until we fire up their website and discover that we could have a pizza ordered AND delivered by the time it finally loads. Slow websites are bad websites.
The designer was either incompetent or simply didn’t care enough to do the hard work to speed up the site, and now the business owner is suffering as a result.
In the world of SEO and internet marketing, speed is a huge factor in determining how your site performs online. It isn’t the only thing, but it is an important criteria–even Google says so.
We all know we live in the middle of the most competitive business environment in human history. The web has totally changed the game, giving everyone the chance to compete for customers and sales all over the world.
Of course, that means that you have to leverage the internet to the best of your abilities – and that’s only going to be possible if your site loads like it’s powered by lightning.
Why does it matter if my website is slow?
Slow websites (sites that take longer than 3 full seconds to completely load) have proven time and time again to cripple sales, kill conversion rates, and wipe out businesses almost entirely. Your site NEEDS to load quickly or you’re going to get crushed by the competition, and that’s the bottom line. Good website designers know how to make fast websites…web design is about more than making a site look pretty, the site also needs to perform.
Bounce rates jump, search rankings tank, and page views – with conversions – drop right through the floor
At the end of the day, if your website isn’t able to load in less than 3 full seconds (and hopefully a lot faster than that) your visitors are going to bail on you without any concern whatsoever. There’s just too many other people out there promising the same stuff you are to get them to sit down and wait for a page to load.
Your bounce rate is going to go through the roof, Google and their search engine ranking algorithm is going to kill your positions on the organic results, and your page views – along with your conversion rate of visitors into paying customers – will collapse completely.
How can I speed up my website?
To speed up your website’s loading time, you’ll need to do a number of things. No two sites are the same, but there are some general steps you can take. First, check your hosting. If you have a website hosted on a poorly-configured, overloaded server, your site will load slowly. Also, try to get your site hosted on a server as close to your target audience as possible. If you want to sell to people in Florida, don’t host your site on a server based in China. You will also want to strip out heavy graphics, compress all your images, eliminate as many unnecessary scripts as possible, leverage caching, minify JavaScript and HTML, use current web standards, and ensure that the design is simple, clean, and minimalist without compromising your ability to sell or influence.
There’s a significant learning curve involved in making your website faster, and if you are not already on a CMS like WordPress, it can become orders of magnitude more time-consuming to fix the site.
It’s a bit of a narrow line to tow, but at the end of the day having a website that is as fast as possible is the only way you’re going to be able to compete in today’s ultra-competitive online business world!
If your website designer dropped the ball, and you still need to make your website faster, get in touch with us now and we’ll work on improving your pagespeed in no time so that you can start gaining more customers and clients.