The Need for Speed: How to Make Your Business Website Faster (and Why You Should)
In today’s digital world, everything is immediate. In fact, most people expect instant results as a side-effect of the internet and modern technology. Consequently, speed is a huge factor in conducting commerce online, and it can either make or break a business. With this in mind, here are ways to expedite your business website and reasons why you’ve got to satisfy your customer’s need for speed.
Why is Speed so Important for Online Business?
According to internet data research, 79% of users will abandon an online business website if they experience slow loading times or performance problems. Furthermore, 64% of mobile device users click out of a website if it doesn’t load within two to three seconds. In light of these unsettling statistics, it’s clear that speed matters when it comes to keeping users on your business website. After all, if a user clicks out of your site due to sluggish load times, you’re losing customers and potential sales.
Moreover, a slow website could be costing you organic traffic. To explain, Google has always penalized websites for slow speeds. In essence, Google gives lower page rank on their search results to websites that do not load within 4 – 7 seconds or less. On the plus side, Google rewards sites that have speedy load times. So, let’s talk about how you can beat these odds and make your website faster.
Use a Lean Content Management System
A content management system (CMS) in website building is an application that allows you or other contributors to create and publish content on your business website. Some CMSs are better than others, and some systems can even slow down your site. Your best choice is to use WordPress (WP). WordPress is the most commonly used CMS by businesses; it accounts for 62% of all CMS-built websites on the internet today. Not only is it popular, but it’s also incredibly easy to use. More importantly, WordPress is a lightweight CMS and is brilliant at facilitating faster websites.
Get the Best Hosting
Now that we’ve established WordPress is the winner in terms of supporting faster website speeds, it’s time to look at getting the fastest WordPress hosting possible. It’s important to go with a hosting service that specializes in WP, and can fully integrate with this CMS. The reason for this is because WordPress hosts are uniquely equipped to enhance and accelerate your business website. WP-centric hosting services also provide regular site backups and keep your site automatically updated, which is another factor in faster load times.
Moreover, obtaining proper hosting is pivotal in leveraging your ecommerce assets. When you consider that 69.9% of online shopping carts are abandoned due to sluggish page load times or dicey site performance, you can clearly understand how speeding your website performance can play a tremendous role in your business success online.
This is why you should consider a solid WooCommerce hosting service for optimal results. WooCommerce is a brilliant tool designed to accept payment for your services or products. With the properly integrated hosting service, WooCommerce can be a dynamo for all your sales and ecommerce needs. As long as you have the proper WooCommerce hosting in place, you have the infrastructure to quickly add the Woo plugin in place and retain customer sales in a speedy, efficient manner on your business website.
All this to say, when you have an ecommerce-centric website host that is accommodating your payment system, and also streamlines the checkout process – you can expect golden results. Ultimately, an ecommerce-centric hosting service will lead to faster load times as well as a seamless checkout experience for your customers.
Choose a Nimble Theme
While website design is crucial to attracting potential customers, it can also be a deficit if it bogs down your site speed. What most business website owners don’t realize is that while some themes are super-pretty and have nifty features – all those bells and whistles take bandwidth to work. Ultimately, the more complex a theme is, the more likely your business website speed will suffer. So while it might be tempting to pick a flashy theme with moving slides and parallax scrolling, remember that simpler is better in terms of faster load times.
Reduce the Number of Plugins on Your Site
Plugins are handy and extremely helpful at automating certain functions on your site, such as contact forms, search boxes, customer review capability, and more. Practically every business website needs at least a few plugins to accomplish the functionality required. However, for every plugin you install, that’s more bandwidth required to make those applications work on your site. So, too many plugins equate to – yes, you guessed it – a sluggish website.
Think About Speed First
When developing and designing your business website, always keep load times at the foremost in your thoughts. For instance, make sure your images are optimized for page speed before uploading them to your site. This will allow for better load times. Also, consider uploading videos on a service provider site such as YouTube or Venmo instead of uploading them onto your WordPress site. This can significantly reduce bandwidth and increase speed.
Ultimately, when you design with speed in mind, you’re doing your business a great service. Remember that slow speed times can be a huge deterrent for your site users and, therefore, a potentially crushing result on your business sales.