Site Speed: I went from 40's to 90's!
Thanks to Hilali1994, my traffic for my site has improved so much!
Anis told me one day last week or so that my site speed is really low and that if I improved it, my rankings will improve. This was over live chat we were talking about rankings and such.
Before this, I had no clue what Site Speed was! So I used Google's PageSpeed Insight test to see what my site was at.
Out of a score of 100 - I had low 40's for both mobile and desktop, and it showed up RED. Not good.
It lists the errors I should fix and after literally days of research and headache to figure it all out. I got the errors fixed and my score jumped up to 90's!
Depending on my host, it will fluctuate between 80s to 90s, something that's out of my control.
I did this last week of February, and look at the nice jump I had in traffic because of this fix:
Results were almost instant!
My blog is six months old now and it was driving me crazy that I couldn't break 50 sessions a day, on Feb 22 when I first started fixing it, it broke 50 sessions finally!
Then I fixed some more and it got it to green, and it hit up to 76 sessions a day on that high point on Feb 27.
What I did to fix the errors will be reserved for my site, so follow along if you'd like to find out what I did. (Link in my profile - sorry, must follow me to see the links, that's how it works here.)
I also took Kyle's advice to increase my postings from 3 times a week to 4 times a week, which I started to do during this last week of Feb as well, so I should see the effects of this on my traffic in the coming months.
With my site speed fixed and increasing my postings to 4 times a week, I'm a good position to see what's to come in the next 6 months!
So lesson here for you is to check your site speed, here are the resources:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insi...
You really never know what you can learn from other WA members and this platform proved once again why Wealthy Affiliate is so worth it!
Thank you Anis (Hilali1994)!!! Sorry if this embarrasses you!
To the next 6 months!
Grace
Recent Comments
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Site loading speed is something I also learned to appreciate when I started looking into e-commerce seriously...For every second delay on the page loading, you lose a huge number of customers...
This means that all the work you do to draw the folks in whether you are paying for clicks or using organic means, you are throwing it away if they have to wait for your page to load...
E-Commerce sites are by nature very image heavy and depending on the number of bells and whistles you add when taken in totem, you have trouble getting a very fast loading page...
Now I have become obsessed with page loading speed hehe...
Here are some of the steps I have taken over the last weeks:
(1) I switched to a host provider that uses solid state drives and the latest software drivers to take advantage of the additional speed you get...
(2) I started using a CDN (Cloudflare), just like the big companies do...
(3) I added server 3 level caching (does not drag the theme site down by being in the theme)
(4) We switched to SSL (this actually slowed the site down, but the other steps compensated and the additional trust that you gain from search engines and from customers was worth it)...
(4a) Another thing not directly related to speed we did was to use a dedicated IP address...Google likes this for any site where you are taking payments...Overall this will help get the customers to have trust in our site...
(5) We minimized image sizes without affecting in any significant manner the quality that the customer sees when they view our products (faster loading)...
(6) We transferred images and certain pages like shop and the front page to AWS S3 in a bucket...Amazon is top of the line when it comes to websites and storage, etc (and CHEAP - our first "bill" was for 6 cents!!)...
(7) We switched themes to a cleaner and faster loading one from the really cool looking but slow one we had...The impetus was our effort to make it a multi-language site because we are selling globally from two locations, one in the EU and one in Asia...After 4 "experts" had screwed it so bad that we had to start over, we decided to go all in and REALLY start over hehe...
(8) We add video served from our youtube channel for product demos but used the embedded versions that do not track (this was a requirement for German law more so than anything else)...
(9) Another change we had to make on the site was using a plugin that would allow the social sharing icons to be activated ONLY after the viewer confirms that they understood that there could be some tracking of their URL if they clicked on the icon...That is ANOTHER requirement to comply with German law, but it actually helped the load time...
Our site is loading within a second for most locations because of these changes....It does take more for the complete page to load up, but the customer will see a good part of the front page within that time...
I have found that I have a need for speed! Thanks for sharing yur story, and reading mine hehe!!
Cheers!
Dave : )
Dave, thanks so much for sharing! I will be bugging further on some of these items.
I have recently learned about CDN and interested in this. Is this a big expense?
How do you do #5? Whenever I do this to the liking of Google PageSpeed, the image quality goes down so much. I've added WP Smush to help with this.
#6) Does this mean AWS hosts too?
#7) Ouch on those experts, glad you got it all figured out!
#9) I've had so many problems with social share plugins. What are you using if I may ask?
Thanks for your detailed reply! So awesome!
No probs on the sharing, this is what this place is all about!
Regarding your comments and questions above....
(1) Is CDN expensive?
It really is not that expensive...We pay an extra 8.99 Euro a month for full on service - there is a free option the host provider we use has, but we wanted the max because of our e-commerce focus ...
There are many options out there but the two biggest are likely CloudFlare and CloudFront...You can incorporate them with a bit of work, I used tech support from the host provider I use and it was done within 30 minutes, and working out the blips was another hour or so...
(2) Reducing Image Sizes...
There are some good tools that will help with this and one is the plugin you mention. Rather than recommend any one over the other, I would say folks should look at the options both free and paid and select the one that fits best for their needs...
Our images are automatically reduced in size and then saved to our designated AWS S3 bucket....It means they are then accessed from that bucket versus taxing the server resources... This is faster than keeping them all on your theme...
(3) AWS hosting...
Oh yes, they most certainly do...They do a whole plethora of things that may help you...It can actually be quite confusing, my advice would be to do a couple of searches and see in blogs or articles which may be right for you....
The beauty of their platform is that they are literally built to handle millions of clients, from small to big...They also have some of the latest hardware in the market and their customer service is good too...
Certainly, there are other host providers out there to include SiteRubix, but as you grow your online business you will naturally want to migrate to the fastest, bestest, mostest....hehe I think you get the point!
(4) 'Experts'
I could tell you mind-numbing horror stories of such folks...Many will promise you the world and deliver...nothing...Worse, in some cases, as with us, they will screw up more what was screwed up...At the end of this nightmare, you have to step back and take charge, which is what we did, and starting over was a blessing ( but a LOT of hard work)...
We have over 400 line items in one store, so you can imagine how much work it has been to put it all back together again...the end product we have now though is MUCH better from so many angles I cannot say I am too angry...
(5) Social plugins...
We use the ones that are built into the theme, but what we added was a plugin that forced the viewer to first agree to activating the social plugins knowing that there is the likelihood that url tracking would take place...
This means a two-step opt-in, and I am sure you will lose some shares and likes because of it...But German law is very strict on this kind of thing, the people are sensitive to keeping their information private (one location our business is registered in is Germany in Bavaria)...
BTW, your post was really good to put some attention on this subject of page loading time...As things move forward, people want even faster access to websites, and you will lose out as you describe if you do not address this...
I know that there are seemingly 100s of things we all have to be aware of and take action on...My best advice would be to have a look at this aspect starting out.....
Pick a theme that is responsive, as light as possible (there are some that look great but they are heavy when it comes to coding, so they will load slowly), and one that has the ability to change some features as you need...
Cheers and have a great day!!
Dave : )
Yes, this is the reason why I Love wealthy affiliate, hmmm actually I fell in love with the community, we have such helpfull members all over. Just ask a question and you'll get the answer and the guidance. Thanks for sharing Grace and Anis.
this is awesome info!
And congratulations on doing that research and finding your answers!
And look at you with the tease to follow lol. Alright fine you got me! :) Following now!
Hi Eric, well, we can't have duplicate content now right? And this is a good post for my site so I have to save it. Sorry. :) When I post about it, it will be detailed and worth the wait.
Actually google doesn't penalize you for duplicate content if you're the author of both. It's when we duplicate from another that we get penalized. But I don't mind following you at all! You're someone I can learn from and I absolutely can't wait for your post to be up! Take your time and be thorough! Great post topic!
you have authorship on this blog just like you do on your site :) I don't think any of us would copy and paste entire posts from one of our sites to the other but writing about the same thing doesn't get you a penalty when you're the author of both.
Awesome, it is really great information. Thanks for sharing it, definitively I will give myself this headache because it helped you.
Thank you for reading this! Yes, you should check it out and learn too. It was a great process but it sounds like I still have so much more to learn with Dave's comment above! Lol
On my profile, or any profile, links are on the bottom right in the section called "Follow me on". As we're not allowed to post our sites in blog posts here, this is the way to do it.
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You learn something new every day at WA
I took your advice on site loading now I will wait and see
You guys are fantastic at sharing info
Thanks Richard
Yes this is what I love about WA and this community! It's truly amazing and worth every penny.