How & Why | Website Speed Matters

In today’s fast-paced world, website speed is more important than ever. When your website takes too long to load, potential customers will quickly click away and move on to the next site. Not only does this mean a potential loss in sales or website visitors, but it also means that your website’s ranking could suffer in search engine results. Fortunately, there are several ways you can speed up your website and make sure it’s running as efficiently as possible. Let’s take a look at why and how website speed matters.

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Why Website Speed Matters

The first thing to understand about why website speed matters is that faster websites tend to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This means that if your website loads quickly, you have a better chance of appearing at the top of Google searches than those sites with longer loading times. The faster your site loads, the more likely it is that people will visit it and stay longer when they do. 

This can lead to increased conversions and an improved reputation for your business overall. This also means fewer returns because people are less frustrated with the process. And don’t forget about SEO! Google has confirmed many times over that site speeds are a factor in ranking websites within their search engine results pages (SERPs).

voice search

Speed is integral to voice search, after all if you have a slow loading website there is a high probability that your website won’t be shown for that search query when someone asks SIRI or OK Google for example, a question on a service or product your website offers.

Voice search is mainly on mobile and so search engines want to provide the best result to the end user. Speed is a factor in the equation, it’s part of the instant algorithmic process in determining whether your site sets returned in the search engine listings.

With the advent of voice search, it is more important than ever to make sure your website is optimized for this new way of searching. Voice search uses natural language processing to interpret queries, so you need to make sure your content is written in a way that will be understood by Google and other search engines.

Why fast website theme helps?

Well, fast website frameworks simply provide a better user experience than slow ones. That’s just the way it is. Consumers are now used to fast websites that load in just a couple of seconds over fast internet connections that they have at home or on their smartphones. If it takes more than 3 seconds for your website to load, you are likely to have a high bounce rate. Which means users will leave your website and go else where. This is not good for your business, the customer experience and the search engines wont rank your website if bounce rate is high.

Part of the equation for website speed is getting a fast loading theme early on. This has a positive impact on general loading times due to the lean coding setup on the theme framework. 

Here are some of the fastest themes for WordPress-based websites.

10 Fastest WordPress Themes in 2022 (Tested and Compared)

You want a website that loads as fast as possible. What should you do? Cloud hosting!

Cloud hosting is when websites are hosted on multiple servers (or “the cloud”) instead of one specific server or computer. This allows multiple users from different locations around the world to access your site at once without slowing down its performance or speed for any individual user. Because cloud hosting utilises multiple servers, it ensures faster loading times for websites—which keeps people engaged and interested in your content.

Advantages of Cloud Hosting 

Aside from its ability to make your pages load faster, there are many other advantages associated with cloud hosting as well. One advantage is reliability; since your site isn’t dependent on just one single server or computer, there’s less risk of downtime due to hardware failure or other technical problems. 

Additionally, security is improved because data is spread across multiple servers instead of one central location, making it harder for hackers or malicious software programs to gain access to sensitive information stored on your website. 

Finally, scalability is another major benefit; with cloud hosting, you can easily adjust your bandwidth needs depending on changes in traffic or usage patterns without having to pay for extra hardware or software upgrades.

Cloud hosting is essential for any business looking for reliable and speedy websites. Not only does it save money by allowing businesses to pay only for the resources they actually use but also provides better performance due to its virtual infrastructure and distributed computing capabilities.

how You Can Improve your website Speed?

There are several ways you can improve the speed of your website. The most important factor is ensuring that all of the code on your site is optimized for optimal performance — meaning that you should use clean coding practices such as minifying JavaScript and CSS files whenever possible. You should also consider hosting your files on a reliable server with adequate bandwidth so that visitors don’t experience lag or slow loading speeds due to heavy traffic or large file sizes.

Additionally, reducing or eliminating redirects from page-to-page can help to improve loading speeds significantly — something which many web developers often overlook when designing their sites. Finally, making sure that images and other elements are properly compressed for quick loading times will ensure that no matter what type of device a user is using, they won’t have any problems accessing your content quickly and easily without any hiccups along the way.

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The technical bit

There are many ways, but here are a few to get you started:

  • Optimise images
  • Enable caching
  • Clean database
  • Purge unused plugins
  • Use a content delivery network (CDN)
  • Cloud Hosting
  • Use a fast framework
  • Website speed optimisation services
 

Website speed tests are not just for developers any more. If you have a website or blog that you are trying to promote then the speed in which the page loads is becoming increasingly important when considering SEO factors, usability & conversion rates.

Here are a few great tools for testing website speed.

GTMetrix – https://gtmetrix.com/

Pagespeed Insights – https://pagespeed.web.dev/

There are lots of online and offline tools to help you optimise images. Some of these tools allow you to upload images and then optimise them, while others let you paste the URL of an image and then optimise it.

Here are some popular tools:

1. The GIMP ( http://www.gimp.org/ ) is a free Photoshop alternative and has a built in command to optimise images. This is available on the “File” tab.

2. Photoshop ( https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud.html ) is the market leader photo editing tool, and this comes with a built in command to optimise images. This is available from the “Save for Web” option, which appears as an additional tab when saving an image.

3. Online tools ( http://imageoptimizer.net/ and http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ ) let you upload an image, optimise it and then download the results. Images are optimised on-the-fly so there is no need to wait for the optimisation process to finish.

4. Offline tools (such as PNGGauntlet and RIOT) can be used on individual images or groups of images. These tools also allow you to add additional processing steps such as converting layers and removing meta-data.

Optimising multiple images at once

You can use a command line tool such as optipng or pngcrush on multiple images at once, but first you need to identify their file names. You can either do this manually, or use a tool such as Bulk Rename Utility ( https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/ ).

Image optimisation configuration in Cloudinary

Cloudinary is a cloud-based image management solution that can be used to create a dynamic presentation of images. Cloudinary allows you to automatically optimise, manipulate and deliver images via a fast CDN.

Conclusion

In conclusion, website speed matters because it impacts both the user experience and search engine rankings — two things that no small business owner should ignore if they want to maximise their online success! By utilising best practices such as optimised coding, reliable hosting services, reduced redirects, and image compression techniques when creating or updating their websites, businesses can ensure their sites are performing as quickly as possible — resulting in improved user engagement and higher SERP rankings over time! With these tips in mind, you’ll be well on your way to increasing both user satisfaction and search engine rankings!