How to Speed Up Your Website Load Time
Does your website take an age to load? It may be the perfect excuse to make a cup of tea, but just think how many sales opportunities are slipping away as you do so. We do everything in a rush now, including internet browsing. So if your website takes longer than 2 seconds to load, then your potential customers are bouncing off your site and clicking on one that opens instantly.
The harsh truth is that slow websites get punished by searchers, and also by Google. If you’re running a high bounce rate, you’re less likely to get a page one slot from the Search Engine. Preferential treatment is given to sites that offer the best customer experience, lots of bounces tells Google that there’s a problem, so you won’t get promoted.
How Does Speed Correlate With Bounce?
Google has created a helpful chart, based on neural modelling. Their tests found the following:
- 1-3 second loading – the probability of bounce increases by 32%
- 1-5 second loading – the probability of bounce increases by 90%
- 1-6 second loading – the probability of bounce increases by 106%
- 1-10 second loading – the probability of bounce increases by 123%
One of our clients we recently optimised for Speed – Direct Stone Ltd
What Causes Slow Loading?
This is a question that we get asked on a daily basis at Imagefix. If we had a fail safe answer we would be millionaires by now! Truth is, there’s lots of reasons why your website could be loading slowly, and it takes a bit of time to diagnose properly. That said, the three most common problems are: large images, slow web hosting, and maintenance problems.
Getting Your Website Up To Speed
Here are three fixes to improve your load speed:
1. Image Compression.
A fairly simple way to improve an image-heavy site is to compress the images. How you do this will depend on what kind of site you have, but there are a number of online tools that you can use for the job.
Imagefix can diagnose the causes of your slow load speed. If large images are a problem, we can provide a compression solution and ensure that all future images will be automatically compressed.
2. Slow Web Hosting.
There’s all kinds of reasons why you’re current server might be slowing you down. Many hosting companies use poor quality servers that do their customers no favours whatsoever. If you’re on a low cost package, or your hosting is free, it might be worth investing a little more to get a better hosting service.
Imagefix offers hosting that is guaranteed to provide consistently faster loading speeds. We enable NGINX Direct Delivery for all sites on our servers, so images for example, will load faster. The other advantage is that if customers have a problem, we’re always available to speak to and we’ll get onto the issue straight away.
3. Maintenance Issues.
Websites tend to be optimised for high performance when they’re first launched, but as the database fills up and the site gets more complex, everything starts to slow down. The solution lies in stripping out unnecessary code, and cleaning up the infrastructure of your site. Often there will be a number of ‘plugins’ that haven’t been updated regularly and are now slowing it down.
The Imagefix team will carry out a full audit of your website in order to diagnose problems that are causing it to load slowly. We’ll then apply a number of fixes that will immediately improve your loading speed.
Why Work With Imagefix?
If you’re looking for a guaranteed increase in your load speed, the best way to achieve this is to get a professional involved. They’ll be able to tell you in a few hours what it could take days or weeks for you to discover yourself. At Imagefix our aim is always to build long-term professional relationships. So we’re not going to overcharge you, or create work where there isn’t any – because we want to be your first choice whenever you need work doing on your website!
“Excellent service for SEO & website building/fixing, we are really pleased with the amount of enquiries coming through which have boosted our web presence and ranking with Google. Garry. & Tina. are so helpful, highly recommended”
How long does it take for your website to load? Imagefix can speed up your load time and lower your bounce rate. Call us today on 01525 715608
