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Thanks, today, for another stunning Infographic and article from regular contributor Josh Wardini.
Josh is writing for us on “Why and how to speed up your site”.
Content Is The King In Digital Marketing
This is the first thing many online marketers learn. Perhaps, you too learned it before anything else.
But guess what?
They didn’t tell you the entire truth: Content is the king only when it is rendered quickly enough.
If you make users wait a long time to view your content, you won’t find many takers, even if you write as well as Jose Saramago, a Portuguese Nobel Prize winner for literature and my personal favorite.
In the online space where every second counts, anything more than 3 seconds delay in page loading is too long, almost an eternity.
Surprised?
Don’t be. Here are some facts collected by HostingTribunal that prove just that.
- 40% of customers leave a site that takes over 3 seconds to load
- The bounce rate probability of a page with 1-3 seconds load time is just 32%, but for a page that loads in 1-5 seconds it is 90%
And it’s not only desktop users who treat a slow site as an internet pariah; mobile users are just as likely to stay away from a sluggish site. According to a report, 74% of smartphone users will abandon a site if it doesn’t load in 5 seconds.
In other words, if your site is slow, users – desktop and mobile – will not stay on it long enough to read your content, let alone to appreciate it.
But things don’t have to be this way.
With some effort, you can improve your site speed and entice viewers to read your content and engage with you.
So what does it really take to reduce page load time? Well, here are some tips that have known to work.
Compress Your Files
It’s a no-brainer that bulkier web pages take longer time to load than lighter pages, if everything else remains the same.
An easy way to reduce page weight is to compress CSS, JavaScript and HTML files. While all these are very important files, they can make your web page weighty as they tend to repeat code and whitespace.
Tools are available for WordPress sites that can reduce page weight considerably and improve load time at the click of a button.
Why don’t you download and use such a tool, of course after ensuring it is a good one by checking its online reviews?
Mobile-friendly Site
If you want your site to load up quickly on mobile devices, you must use a mobile-friendly theme. There are many such themes available in WordPress, some paid and others free.
Naturally, paid themes have better features and scalability. If you have the budget, I’d strongly recommend a premium mobile-friendly theme.
Web-hosting Option
It is very possible that you’re getting more traffic than your hosting plan can manage. Check with your provider, and if that’s the case, consider upgrading.
Defer Video
Embedded videos make your content more engaging, but they can also slow site speed. Deferring video allows you to show video content without compromising on page speed. However, considerable coding prowess is required to defer video. If you are not a skilled developer yourself, you might benefit a great deal from hiring a talented web developer.
Infographic
With website speed being crucial to your online business, something which this fun-packed infographic shows all too clearly, I believe this can prove to be a great investment.
