A faster site can work wonders for your brand.
How long does it take your site to load? If you don’t know, or haven’t checked in a while, now’s the perfect time to check in. Site speed plays quite an important role in the eventual success of your site, including:
- Visitor retention. Visitors may grow impatient if forced to wait for your website to load.
- User satisfaction. Your site speed is, in some ways, a reflection of your brand’s quality standards.
- Conversions. Speedy form submissions and checkout pages will result in more conversions.
If your site is even a second slower than your competitor’s, it could actively work against you.
So what steps can you take to boost your site speed?
These can get you started:
- Use a good caching plugin. Caching plugins store website data so they load quicker upon subsequent visits. This won’t work for first-time visitors, but can improve loading times for repeat visitors.
- Reduce redirects. Redirects will nearly double the time it takes a user to get from point A to point B. They’re necessary, at times, but may clog up the works if you’re not careful.
- Improve your server. Your server performance plays a massive role in how quickly your site loads. If you’re sharing a server with lots of other sites or if it’s not performing optimally, your load times may suffer.
- Optimize images and videos. Your images and videos will be some of the most data-intensive pieces of content on your site. Make sure they’re properly formatted, and compressed so they can load quickly without affecting quality.
- Optimize for mobile devices. Mobile devices tend to have much slower loading times than their desktop counterparts. Accordingly, mobile-optimized pages tend to perform better because they’re simpler and sleeker—both for mobile and desktop users.
- Clear out unnecessary data. Take the time to remove any plugins you don’t use actively, and delete any old blog drafts that are no longer relevant.
If you’re interested in redesigning your website, optimized for speed, or if you need help correcting inefficiencies on your current website, contact Quez Media today!
