Page speed is a key piece of a successful marketing strategy. It has a significant impact on SEO, conversions, and social media sharing rates not just mobile page speed. While mobile browsing continues to increase, website speed can be an issue across all platforms. As you create your marketing strategy for the next year, consider how page speed affects your overall success.
What is Page Speed?
Page speed is a measure of how fast or slow a page loads compared to other pages on the internet at that same point in time. In other words, it measures how long it takes a specific webpage to load into someone’s browser from the point at which they click on a link or enter a URL into their address bar. When page speed is slow, your web design skills aren’t the issue-it’s an internet connection-related problem. If a page loads quickly, but slows down considerably after a certain amount of time, you have a bandwidth issue.
In short, page speed is the loading time from point A to point B. You can’t control how fast or slow someone’s internet connection is, but you can create a site that loads quickly and effectively if you know what to focus on.
How Slow Page Speeds Affect Sales？
Slow page speeds affect conversions on all levels. If you can’t even get people to your website in the first place, there’s no way they’re buying from you. Social media sharing is very much dependent on how quickly a page loads. If your site isn’t compelling enough for someone to share, you’re not going to get the traffic that makes sales.
SEO is impacted in that search engines will rank slower websites lower than their faster counterparts. Many people see SEO as a “set it and forget it” solution for good content and watch the rankings come rolling in. While this may be true, you need to consider all aspects of SEO if you expect results in the long run. A slow website with great content won’t get ranked anywhere near whereas a fast website with mediocre content gets ranked, so take into consideration page speed when designing your new site or revamping an existing one.
What Causes Slow Page Speeds?
Several factors can cause a page to load slowly. If your hosting is shared, you might have to upgrade your package. Download too many images and your page speed will suffer. Use a lot of Flash or javascript and people who don’t have certain plug-ins installed won’t be able to see your site. Links are really easy to create, but they can end up creating a mess for users with slower internet connections who want the text of your links to load quickly, not the link itself. Try experimenting with different colors for links to get the right balance between aesthetics and loading speed.
How Does Speeding up Your Web Pages Affect SEO?
Speeding up your web pages affects SEO in two main ways: search engine crawlers and actual users. The former is a technical issue quickly your web pages load for the crawlers, how often they update, and whether or not they can follow links from one page to another. If your site is slow, you’ll have trouble getting good rankings because Google doesn’t like slow websites. Slow sites will also get less traffic overall because people don’t stay on them as long.
If a visitor has to wait too long for a page to load it becomes very frustrating and to avoid that frustration, they leave the website altogether. Each time a user leaves a website without purchasing there is a significant chance that they won’t come back at all shortly if at all.
How to Optimize Your Website to Increase Page Speed？
To optimize your website to increase page speed you need to find all of the steps in your design process that can become time-consuming. This is not a beginner’s task and it’s important to know what you’re doing and why.
For example, saving images in a format like PNG-8 instead of the larger JPEG will give people faster load times with no quality loss because PNG-8 images are compressed. The loading time is very small, but it can make a difference when you get to thousands or millions of page views daily. Find ways to cut back on your site’s file size and bandwidth if possible because this directly impacts how quickly your pages load.
Several Shopify Apps to Improve Page Speed
WP Rocket
This is a premium plugin for WordPress that makes your website load quickly. It comes with several different options so you can pick and choose how much optimization you want to have on your site.
Lightweight
This is another plugin, but it’s free so there are no hidden costs involved in the decision to use this app to increase page speed. However, if you upgrade from Basic to Plus or Pro it will cost money; the upgrade is about $30 per year (prices change), but considering what WP Rocket charges (about $180 annually), Lightweight is still a relative bargain.
CSS Sprite Generators
There are also CSS sprite generators that create one big image containing all of the smaller images that load when someone visits your website. This will make the page load quickly but it has to be handled properly with CSS-if not, you could end up making your site load even more slowly because now the browser is loading two images instead of one smaller image plus separate CSS. However, if you’re proficient with HTML and CSS, learn how to use sprite generators!
Choosing a Good Hosting Company
This may seem obvious, but choosing a hosting company that offers unlimited bandwidth and storage will help reduce costs in the long run while still improving speed exponentially (and thus improving SEO). If you get stuck on this step and don’t know where to start doing research online will get you pointed in the right direction make sure you read reputable reviews about the hosting company you’re considering.
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