Whether you like it or not, there are two things that turn off people from your website more than anything else.
When it’s ugly, and when it’s slow. (TWEET THIS) The first one is obvious. If it’s not designed well, looks cheap, and is hard to use, then people will presume that your service or product is the same way. That if you take so little care of your potential customer when they first “meet” you on your website, then they assume you’ll continue in that once they become a paying customer.
The second one may not be as obvious to you, but your website’s speed can be just as important.
We live in a get-it-now society where if anything is slower than we think it should be, we move on (or simply complain). Think about how many times you’ve looked at your phone today because you were going to have to wait 30 seconds before the next “thing” became available. Could have been a line you waited in, a client you waited for, a conversation that was paused, or any number of things. We live in a world where doing “nothing” is looked down upon, and this is reflected in people’s patience while surfing the web. If you can’t have your website page up in the first 3 seconds of connection, then you’ll run into problems. So obviously, the faster the better.
But the problem is never as important as the solution, so here are 3 ways you can improve your website’s speed today!
Resize your images:
As mentioned in a past blog post, it is most common to resize your image files to 600 pixels. This, of course, doesn’t apply to background images (though probably 1,500 would do) or any special images you want a customer to zoom in on and examine, but it’s a good rule of thumb. Some of my header pictures started as 20.8MB files and then dropped down to 137 KB after resizing them to 900 pixels so this is a GREAT place to start.
Have a good Website Host:
As also mentioned in the same blog post about hosting, finding a good host for your website is important. Something I didn’t mention in that post was a website host’s "DNS response time”. This is essentially how long it takes for a person’s browser to reach the host of your website. This number is measured in milliseconds, and needs to be in the double digits, if not the single digits.
Consider Changing Your Website Theme:
Your theme itself can have a negative impact on the speed of your website. Themes could even look the same, but be coded differently, which is important to speed. I suggest using Pingdom or another service to test whichever themes you’re interested in BEFORE you use them at all, because this will give you the opportunity to see which theme is simply faster, without any of your content.
There are always more things you can do, but I find that these have most impact and are some of the quickest fixes that you can do. I’d love to hear if you have other suggestions or questions on this topic!
Related
