How fast your page loads has been important for a long time. It impacts three major things: whether people hang around while your page loads, your Google search rankings, and the mobile user experience.
The bottom line is that if you page loads in under five seconds, you’re OK from a Google search standpoint. But the faster you can get your page to load, the better from a user experience standpoint, and the fewer users who will abandon your site at page load.
I thought I’d explain what we do here regarding your site speed. Most of this is technical, but I want to share it anyway so that you know we pay attention to this area.
- We add data compression and cacheing.
Specifically, we use a WordPress plugin called WP-Rocket that enables gzip compression on your site. This usually takes a second or two off your page load speed for a site that does not have gzip compression enabled. It’s a high-payback addition that’s worth its cost.
- We modify the site’s images so they load faster.
We serve scaled images, which means your images are resized to the size that is best for your site. We also run our images through lossless compression so they are optimized to load faster.
- We remove all inactive themes and plugins from your site.
This simply gets rid of any dead weight and helps reduce site hacking and other online abuses more than it does site speed.
- We keep your software versions updated.
This includes theme upgrades, plugin upgrades, and WordPress upgrades as well as systems software upgrades.
- We keep our hardware updated and fast.
In January 2018, we upgraded our server to the fastest chip available in the line of servers we were in.
- We install AMP.
All of our sites with blogs have accelerated mobile pages (AMP) installed, which is code that speeds page load time. As AMP becomes available for other pages, we’ll be rolling it out.
Test Your Site
Use these free speed tools to test your page load time. And try more than one of them because you will get a different time on all of them.
http://www.monitis.com/pageload/
https://www.uptrends.com/tools/website-speed-test
https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test.aspx
Test Your Mobile Speed
Use this site to test your mobile speed.
https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-us
The Tool We Use
To get a report card on site speed, we use the tool at https://gtmetrix.com/ . Don’t expect to get more than a D grade; these people are very hard graders! That’s why we look at their advice and try to do what we can within the limitations we have to work with.
If you’re a monthly client and have page loads slower than five seconds, let us know and we’ll troubleshoot your site at no cost to you.