It’s Time to Fix Your Slow Website
How long does it take your website to load? Across any device, a website should ideally load within a few seconds. After all, that’s what web users have grown accustomed to. Anything longer than a few seconds results in frustration and is a scary reminder of the dial up days of yore. Nobody wants to revisit that time period! A slow website can force a user to bounce from the site and instead, click on a competitor and purchase from them. Not only is it a lost visitor but it’s also a lost conversion.
If not providing a good experience to visitors isn’t compelling reason enough to improve the speed of your website, then this might be: Google is testing a red “slow” label in the search results for slower sites. Now, I highly doubt you want that red label that sticks out like a sore thumb showing up next to your site in the search results. It’s essentially a stop sign: don’t click here!
Yes, it’s true that this is only a test. For now. What we do know about Google is that they don’t test things for no reason. There’s a very good chance that this will find its way into the search results page sooner or later, or a similar variation will. For example, think about the mobile-friendly label that Google was testing only a short time ago. Within a few months the label officially made its way into the search results. Now, when you’re searching on a mobile device- do you seek out the sites that have the mobile-friendly label? I know I do and I’m happy that Google eliminated that annoying guessing game: will this load properly on my phone or not? Now I simply avoid the links that don’t have the mobile-friendly label.
I’ll avoid any site that is designated as “slow” too, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. The bottom line is this- your site is past due for some work if it’s taking more than a few seconds to load. If you’re looking for more official data about how your site is loading (outside of conducting a simple test on your own) here are a few tools to check out:
Google Page Speed Insights. Information straight from Google. Simply type in your URL and Google will generate a report that includes a score for both mobile and desktop. It will tell you what you should fix, what you should consider fixing, and where the site passed.
Pingdom Website Speed Test. Enter the URL and select the location to test from, preferably a location that’s closest to where you are located. You might also want to uncheck the box that says, “Save test and make it public”. This tool will tell you how many seconds it took for the site to load, how it compares to other sites, and will show you any pages considered to be bottlenecks.
You might have the greatest product/service and the best content on the web, but if your site is slow there’s a good chance people aren’t seeing it. Take steps to change that today!
Categorized in: SEO
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