Does your website load at the speed of light or at a snail’s pace?
As a guide, it should be loading in less than three seconds – and in less than two if it’s an online shop.
Any longer and as many as 40% of visitors will give up – with 46% never trying the site again.
You can check its performance using a number of tools, including Google’s PageSpeed Insights https://pagespeed.web.dev and GTmetrix https://gtmetrix.com.
(The default GTmetrix server is in Canada; if you’d like your site tested from the UK, get in touch and I’ll do it for you. When testing, be sure to try each tool a few times, as results can vary from test to test – sometimes by quite significant margins.)
If you’re not getting a big green A for GTmetrix or something like 100% for PageSpeed Insights, then ask your web designer why.
Here are a couple of screen shots of PageSpeed Insights results: one for my own site and for one I recently made for a client, Ace of Media (their DIY site was originally on Wix; I cut the load time from 5.5-6.5 seconds to less than 1 second, even though the home page now has a video running in the background).
And here’s a shot of GTmetrix results for my own site:
Have you made your site yourself using WordPress? If so, consider using plugins like Imagify to compress images and WP Rocket to magically speed things up.
If you doubt the importance of website performance, have a look at this article from Website Builder Expert: Website Load Time Statistics: Why Speed Matters in 2022.
As it says: load speed can make or break a website, so please make sure that your site is running faster rather than slower.
Questions? Feel free to mail me: eric@doodlydog.uk
