So, you’ve built your website and it’s looking totally tip-top. You know it looks fab with all those images, but it’s so blinking slow to load.

It’s just no good having a good-looking website that loads really slowly.

So you’re probably wondering what you can do to try and improve the speed? Well here are my top 3 tips for helping speed up your website:

 1. Caching Plugin

Your website hosting may already include a caching plugin. I use Krystal Hosting and that includes the Lightspeed caching plugin. You basically just need to activate the pre-installed plugin. There are also paid for plugins and one of the most recommended is WP Rocket. plus WP Rocket.

39% of users will stop engaging in a website if the images take too long to download

2. Optimise Images

The biggest thing here is to male sure that your images are scaled and optimiased to the correct dimensions for their place on your website. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to just upload the (huge) image they took on their phone. These are big resolution images and probably way too many pixels wide for the space on the page. So, I size and optimse images before I upload them. If the space on the page is 300×300 pixels then I size that image to 300×300. I’ve audited way too many wesbites where a massive images have been uploaded then, someone has tweaked with the sizing on the page to squidge it and make it fit.

I also use a plugin to compress the images even further once they are on the website. There are few free ones out there that do this, but my fave is WP Smush.

By compressing images and text, 25% of pages could save more than 250KB and 10% can save more than 1MB (which contributes to page load times).

Google 2018

3. Website Hosting

This is another one that’s often overlooked. People very often go for the cheapest pricing, but that can also be the slowest hosting. You may get away with that if you have a very simple website with barely any images etc but it’s not going to work for many websites. I find Krystal hosting is pretty good for most websites, even at the lowest price band.

If you have an ecomm wesbite or are very image heavy then you may want to pay to upgrade hosting to get a good response time for your customer. If clients need better hosting then I would generally recommend WP Engine (very good for enhanced security too) and many people swear by Flywheel.

Nearly 70% of consumers admitted that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. Furthermore, of all the people surveyed, half said they’d be willing to give up animation and video for faster load times.

Unbounce 2019

How do you know your website is slow?

Well, very often your potential customers won’t bother telling you. They will just junp ship (well website) and go to one of your competitors.

There are free tools that can help you to see the speed of your wesbite on mobile and the speed of your website on desktop. If you run your domain name through them, it will not only tell you the speed that your customers will experience but also give you tips on where you can imporve it, e.g. massive images.

The one that I tend to use is Google PageSpeed Insights which is one of the more user friendly but with good advice on how to improve the page speed.

Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5).

Portent 2019

The key takeaway is that while a few extra seconds may not seem like a big deal, the consumer stats say otherwise. With extra seconds costing you website conversions and potential customers.

And certainly pay attention to not only what your website looks like on mobile, but also how it loads – too many big images or page elements can have a big impact on this. And when you consder that at least half of Internet users are browsing on their mobiles (sometimes a much higher figure in some demographics and niches) then it’s soething you can’t ignore.