Why is Your Website Slow?
So how quickly does your website load? When you put in your domain and you click enter, how long does it take for that site to actually come up?
If you’ve been around for a while, you probably remember the sound of dial up. It was the worst, it took forever. Now almost everybody has high-speed Internet. So most people expect a site to load quickly. This is important for your customers because if a customer comes to your website, and it doesn’t load immediately, it’s almost like a trigger to them that your site is broken.
Slow websites frustrate customers
So if your page loads too slowly, your customers are going to abandon you. If your customer abandons your website, they’re not gonna buy your things. You want them to stay on your website. There’s several things that could factor into why your website is loading slowly.
Before we talk about the things that are making it slow, you should understand basically how websites work. In order to have a website load in your computer, you have to send a request to receive a packet of information. That packet of information comes back, and you get information on your screen. You can only do this one at a time. It’s super, super fast. But, the more round-trip packet requests it takes, the slower your site loads.
Your pictures are too big
Let’s use the mechanic example again. You want to sell more oil changes. So, what do you do? You take a great picture of you, changing oil. That makes sense, but you take it with your iPhone. It’s awesome, great quality photo, fantastic. And it’s plenty large for a website. It’ll look great. The problem with a photo from your DSLR or your iPhone is that the file size is too large. It’ll take multiple trips just to get that image to show up on your browser. So what you want to do is have small file size images. There are tools you can use to compress the image size, so you still have a beautiful image, without taking too many trips to load.
Test your page speed
So you’re thinking, “I don’t know, is my site slow?” So there are websites you can use that are essentially online tools, to test your load speed of your website. I would encourage you, right now, go and test your site load speed. This tool from Google provides a lot of information you can use to determine what exactly is keeping your site from loading quickly.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
After you’ve done that, you know what your speed is. Test your biggest competitor. Is their site loading faster than yours? That’s a problem, your site’s broken. After you’ve tested the load speed of your website, if you see that it’s performing poorly, there are many things you can do to improve the load speed of your site. Some of it gets pretty technical.
If this all seems too daunting, Do Good Media is happy to help. For less than $500 we offer a website audit package, where we will go over your website and detail all the necessary changes to get your website running smooth and effectively.
If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you might be able to do this to improve the load speed of your site today. If that seems daunting, if you’re like, “I don’t want to do this,” then call Do Good Media. We would love to build a site that works for you.
- If your website is slow, people will abandon it quickly
- Compress image sizes before putting them online
- Test the speed of your website against your competitor