Fixing your website speed, what does it really mean?

The first thing you should do is test your speed.

I use Think With Google’s site testing tool to identify the baseline speed. You might be surprised by how poor the result is because your site will likely load a lot faster on your own computer after it has cached your webpages (stored your data locally so it can retrieve it more efficiently).

The standard speed your website has to meet before a large portion of your visitors start clicking off is only 2 seconds. If it takes longer than three seconds you could be losing 40% of your traffic.

But it’s not just lost traffic but lost sales too!

The site testing tool has a neat feature where it can estimate the exact dollar cost of every 1 second more your site takes to load and it is a hefty price that only increases as your business grows.

When I tested one of my sites my 5 second loading time, which is only 2 seconds more than the standard was costing me more than $5,000 yearly, and that was a conservative estimate!

I’ve since fixed this speed problem because it was literally a $5,000 cost.

You can get a great report from the Google tool giving you some recommendations for how to optimize your page speed, but it will ultimately come down to compression and fixing your code to be more efficient.

Thinking of it in terms of how the page is technically delivered to your computer helps you understand why.

Every webpage is just a collection of HTML, CSS, and probably some JS. This is all lines of code that have to be packaged into tiny groups to travel quickly through the internet to reach your computer or the ‘client’ from whatever server it was hosted on. Reducing the amount of code lets the browser render everything much faster.

Understanding the compilation process is a whole other topic and the most I can do to help you out if you’re set on doing it yourself is point you in the direction of some free coding classes such as freecodecamp.

I’m going to assume that the majority of people viewing this page don’t have the time to go that in-depth with their study just for one website.

It’s why you might be tempted to get a website for a company like Wix or Squarespace. But before you go to Wix etc. and potentially make a big mistake in hosting providers I would encourage you to read my article: I analyzed Wix, a Popular Website Builder and found so many problems. It could save you countless hours of time and money invested in the wrong platform for your business website.

So you might be thinking what can I do then if I can’t learn advanced computer science skills and I don’t want to be restricted by platform website builders like Wix?

That was a leading question but the answer is simple at least. Hire a professional. Good web developers have been studying the ins and outs of websites for years, we know everything about optimizing them to an inch of their lives. I can even go over your website for free, just give me your site URL and I’ll take a look.

If you still want to do it yourself which I respect, you can also stay tuned for a different kind of course where I’ll give you the secrets to launching your business site in just 20 hours.

Read More