According to Google, the probability of a bounce on a website (ie. a website visitor who leaves without taking any further action) increases by 32% as a page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds.
Furthermore, according to Portent, a website that loads in 1 second has a 3x higher conversion rate than a website that loads in 3 seconds.
And if you need more reasons to test your website loading speed, when Backlinko analyzed 11.8 million Google search results, they found that the average loading time of a first page result was 1.65 seconds.
So, does website speed matter? You bet.
Today, we’re going to break down how you can:
- Test your website’s current speed
- Increase your website’s speed
- Achieve lower bounce rates and higher conversions
How to test your website speed.
You can do this now, for free.
Personally, my favorite tool is Google PageSpeed Insights. Just plug in your website address.
The “performance” score will give you a good indication of how fast your website is, but it’s really just a combination of various scores. To get more granular, here are the metrics you should pay attention to:
- First contentful paint (FCP): This number represents how long it takes visitors to see the first parts of your website being displayed in their viewport.
- Largest contentful paint (LGP): This number represents how long it takes visitor to see the entirety of your website displayed in their viewport.
- Total blocking time (TBT): The number represents how long visitors are blocked from interacting with your website because it is loading.
In general, here are some numbers to strive for:
- Total performance score: > 80
- FCP: <3.0 s
- LGP: <3.5 s
- TBT: 0ms
Of course, that begs the question… how do you achieve these numbers?
3 ways to increase your website’s speed today.
Likely, you’ll need your website developer’s help to achieve this.
If they’re unavailable or incapable of completing these tasks, reach out to us for a free digital marketing diagnosis. In most cases, we can speed your website up for free :)
Here are four ways to increase your website’s speed today.
1. Compress images/serve in webp format
In many cases, the images on your website make up the majority of your server load (and thus, impact your website’s speed more than any other elements).
Compressing your images is a great way to positively impact website speed. Compression sacrifices a bit of quality to reduce the scale and size of your images.
Services like Imagify are amazingly-cheap and cost effective for almost any website owner.
WebP formatted images are the new standard image format that should be used on all websites (as opposed to PNG or JPGs). They are smaller in size, and even come in “lossless” quality – ie. they are 25% smaller than PNG images and have the exact same image quality.
2. Use browser caching
Browser caching works by remembering certain elements of your website as visitors navigate to different pages. For instance, elements like your logo, footer, and fonts can be “remembered” by browsers as people visit different pages on your website, reducing server load time.
If you’re using WordPress (and, you probably are), you can use free plugins like WP Super Cache or paid plugins like WP Rocket (the one we use). If your server supports it, you could also use Lightspeed Cache.
When used correctly, browser caching can drastically improve your website’s speed.
3. Minify CSS/Javascript
CSS code is essentially responsible for how your website looks. The problem? Most websites have tons of CSS bloat – ie. code that is not needed or used on any page of your website.
Minifying CSS code essentially reduces the amount of code on your website.
Javascript is responsible for some essential functionality of your website. It can be comprised on many different Javascript snippets that accomplish different things, from showing a Google Map or embedding your Facebook page.
Minifying Javascript removes unused code, compacting the source material.
Note: these options can break your website when used incorrectly.
Your website speed matters more than you think.
How often have you clicked on a website… only to back out because it loads too slowly?
If your website is too slow, people are doing that on your website every single day.
Luckily, there are easy ways to diagnosis and fix your website speed.
First, head over to Google Pagespeed Insights to diagnosis your website’s speed. Then, contact your website developer (or get in touch with us!) to start troubleshooting and fixing the errors that are causing your website to load slowly. Speeding up your website should be relatively easy.
You can have a faster, error-free website today :)