Let’s get some facts straight!
According to well published research from Google, 53% of visitors will abandon their mobile session if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load your website page. This results in less traffic coming to your site, higher bounce rates, and eventually lower SEO rankings. If your site takes longer than 5 seconds, you might as well hang a sign out saying you’re closed.
Obviously, some pages are more important than others and affect the visitor’s perception and behavior more strongly. Most likely, your homepage is one of the most important pages to load quickly. If you’re running ads or email campaigns with landing pages on your website, then you need to make sure they are also lightning fast.
Are your customers leaving your website BEFORE it loads?
A site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds according to research made by Portent in 2022. With every passing second, you lose visitors, potential leads, subscriptions, or whatever else is in you are attempting to put into your marketing funnel.
What are some common website performance issues?
Generally speaking, when you connect to a website, you are connecting to a web server, where HTML code, JavaScript files, images, videos, external scripts, and other files can be “downloaded” to your browser. Therefore, the more files and connections to make during the loading of your page, the slower the page will load for your visitors. A large volume of non-optimized images can often be a major culprit, as well as having lots of widgets and plugins.
Another problem can be with the WordPress theme and/or website builder that’s being used. Themes and builder that come packed with all kinds of really cool features and effects and also add to the number of files necessary to make it all work. Often times, these themes and builder are loading the files, even if you aren’t using them.
A handy tool to show you what files are being downloaded is GTmetrix Website Performance Tool. You can use the “Waterfall” tab to see the web server connection and the file being downloaded. This can be useful to see very large files that are being downloaded, like an image that’s way to big for what you need. Or, it might be a file on an additional remote web server that’s causing a long delay due to latency.
How to reduce website performance issues
If you have a WordPress website or you’re planning to build one, make sure you’re using a high quality and well supported theme. Free doesn’t necessarily equal good, but there are some well free themes like Astra and GeneratePress (open source) that have been around for a long time and get great results. If you have the budget, take a look at a theme called Breakdance. It’s super lightweight and flexible, but has all the features you need to build a stunning website. There are also some truly great website builder plugins that act as your theme. My recommendation for that is the Oxygen Builder. It is extremely powerful, especially if you’re a developer or power users, but it’s also great for the novice.
If you need help diagnosing your website for performance issues, please consider plumThumb. We are ready to help. Contact us today!
