The Need for Site Speed Part1
Make Your WordPress Website Load Faster!
Site load time is an important component to your overall success. Even if you discount the SEO, and ranking benefits a faster loading site will improve the user experience. Happy visitors make for happy buyers, which is what we are all striving for. Conversions!
Hey Y'all. I hope that all of you enjoyed the laughs in my last few posts. But I guess it is time for me to post some useful content. Not that a good chuckle isn't important.
I thought this was going to be one post. But after laying it out on paper I realized that you would be scrolling forever. I hope you will follow the subsequent posts as they will contain some great tips for speeding your site up.
Some of these many of you have seen published here at WA. But there are a few that I haven't seen any information on at all. So stay tuned.
So just how slow is too slow?
Here are some stats compiled in 2011.
- if your site loads in 5 seconds it is faster than approximately 25% of the web;
- if your site loads in 2.9 seconds it is faster than approximately 50% of the web;
- if your site loads in 1.7 seconds it is faster than approximately 75% of the web;
- if your site loads in 0.8 seconds it is faster than approximately 94% of the web.
Keep in mind these times are from 2011 fast forward to 2016.
What are acceptable load times in today's environment?
In Google’s Site Performance for Webmasters video, Maile Ohye, states that “2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.”
Now let's think about this for a second. Oops, sorry, your competitor's site already loaded. Google tries to achieve a load time of under a half of a second. That is 0.5 seconds that is 500 milliseconds. To help put that into perspective it takes between 300 and 400 milliseconds to blink your eye!
It appears that our sites should load anywhere between 0.5 and 2 seconds. At least that should be our goal.
Lets check a few websites and see how they perform.
We all know the amount of information on the WA site, most of ours pale in comparison. I have got some work to do!
Amazon has concluded from testing that for every second of load time conversions drop 7%. So there is a need for site speed.
Here are a couple of links for page speed insights. The Google tool is an excellent test for your mobile metrics.
The Good News!
There are many easy and mostly free ways we can cut load time from our sites. Check out Need for Site Speed Part2 and we will get started.
Food for thought....
Pizza is round right? Why is it delivered in a square box? Hmmm
Until next time,
Recent Comments
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Yessir! Great to hear from you David. be sure to stop by tomorrow if you have the time. We will get down to some how to's! Thanks for your time
Very interesting post here. I am waiting for Part 2. Thank you for the stats and for highlighting that this is an important part of website building.
My pleasure the good stuff is coming check out part 2. Great to hear from you Nathalie. Thanks for stopping by!
Great post, Tim. It not only helps you get more visitors, it also helps your rank in search engines :)
Yes it does Lisa. thanks for stopping by Check out Part 2 to see if maybe you can gain a half second or so. Thanks for your visit
It would take too long to assemble a round box...which is what your post is about....the need for speed......great post Tim, you could make yourself a cup of coffee while my advice-for-living site loads...
Thanks Michael I got the jitters so bad right now I don't know how these letters are straight. I even changed to iced tea no help of course it is doubled brewed. Thanks for stopping by
Still playing the insurance game.
If it takes Much longer I will put my Lawyer Dreamer 56 on the case.
I got the gift of gab Mike and would do anything in the world for you But i think we might need bigger guns than I have lol!
Maybe. But I think we could scare them together. and we can Get Steve Cox to help if needed.
Paula you can file this for a bit later but part 2 will have something you can use right away! Thanks for stopping by
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Thanks for sharing these test sites Tim. I just ran my site through the google site and I can see it could stand some improving particularly with Mobile metrics. I thought it was interesting that my only serious issues (red) were related to my WA banners. That's probably impacting most of us. I'll be eagerly awaiting Part 2 in hopes you have some non-techie friendly solutions. The solutions recommended on the test site may as well be in Mandarin from my perspective :)