One of the things that often gets overlooked when building a website is speed. Having a fast website is CRUCIAL in today’s modern era. With more and more people browsing the web on smart phones, if you’re not thinking about speed when building your website, you’re making a mistake.
Too many people spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on making a website look good, or get traffic. But is your website fast? The most beautiful, well placed website in the world will not generate leads if it’s slow. Make sure you’re being smart with your resources.
How fast should my website load?
The ideal time is 2 seconds. Under 3 is still very good, and under 4 is good. Above that and you will want to see what you can do to speed up the load time.
What slows down my website?
There are a large number of things which play a factor. Here are the main ones:
- A cheap server – this is the biggest factor. If you have cheap hosting, your website will be slow
- Video – if you have any video on your website, it will slow it down. Depending on how it is played, either by a lot or a little
- Images – especially if there are lots of big images, like in a slideshow
- Javascript – if your website has any cool bells or whistles, it probably uses Javascript, which can slow it down
- Facebook Embedded Posts Widget – we see this a lot. It’s neat, but really slows down a website
What can I do to speed up my website?
- Compress your images and videos
- Use a caching plugin if you use WordPress or Joomla
- Make sure you’re on professional grade hosting
- Remove unnecessary plugins and use regular HTML/CSS to accomplish the same features
- Use a Content Delivery Network like Cloudflare to speed up your website even more
How can I tell if my website is fast or slow?
We use www.gtmetrix.com to test our websites. They give you a grade, which you can use as a guide but mostly ignore. The main thing to look for is the page load speed. It should be around 4 or 5 seconds at the slowest.
We hope this blog post was helpful! Let us know if you would like us to do a speed audit on your website, and give you a price on how to make it faster. Contact us at info@freshlookwebdesign.com or 757-646-7908.
