Page Speed: Does It Matter?
Does It Make a Difference How Quickly Your Web Pages Load?
- You never want your site visitors to say, “Let’s wait around while this webpage takes forever to load!”
- Page loading speed is even more important to keep visitors who have very slow internet service. They need all the help they can get.
- Search engines think it is important, too. From their viewpoint, the faster a web page loads, the less of their resources it takes to index it. All those saved milliseconds add up when they are indexing billions of pages. This savings is why there’s Page Speed Insights from Google.
How Fast Is Your Website?
Fortunately, if you are running a WordPress site with a Genesis theme, you are already ahead of the game. That’s what we use for all of our websites.
Go ahead and check our page speed for yourself with a Pingdom Website Speed Test. Copy and paste the URL for this page into the test, choose the test city, and go! It’s free and analyzes the loading speed of a web page to find bottlenecks.
- Update January 11, 2017: With awesome updates to the WPRocket WordPress Plugin, our website is running even faster. Check out the second picture!
Another free page speed test is available over at GTmetrix. They offer “insight on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it.” Sign up for a free basic account to check your website.
What’s a Webmaster To Do About Increasing Page Speed?
Here’s a starter list of things we do to speed up our page loading times:
- Optimize your web images. Making web-friendly image files is one of the easiest steps to take. We like Imagify, a free image optimizer plugin for WordPress. Imagify has awesome email support. Use your image editor to crop images, but let Imagify optimize them without losing picture quality.
- Add a WordPress caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache (Free), WP Super Cache (Free), or WP Rocket (Paid). We’ve tried each of these, and our favorite is WP Rocket (and no, we are not an affiliate on this one.) The good news is that if you hire Sweetened Condensed Web Solutions to do a website for you, we’ll add WP Rocket for free for one year!
- Check your web hosting. Shared hosting can have some significant slowdowns or crash if one of the sites has a traffic spike. For starter WordPress websites, spend a little extra and choose a web host that offers a plan optimized for WordPress sites.
Articles for improving page speed abound on the internet. Here are a couple of our favorites. Contact us for a free page speed evaluation of your website. We’ll also send a quote for improving your page loading speed.
- Page Speed at Moz.com From a very techie website with a great wealth of information for small business owners, this is an in-depth article.
- Make Your Website Fast Very easy to understand article with some great tips.