The two things killing your website speed

You might not know it but your website could be suffering from a chronic condition that is killing your website speed and potentially your SEO, user experience, and return visits.

And the worst part about it is that you have no idea how bad it is because of the way the internet works.

It’s something that’s easy to fix, and I’m going to show you how it’s done in two simple steps.

I’m talking about website speed. You’re probably well aware that speed is important for search engines, and Google lists it is a ranking factor, but perhaps the worst effect it has is irritating your customers BEFORE they’ve even SEEN what you have to show them. Now that’s not a good start, is it?

I checked out three fairly high profile local businesses around my area. They are often recommended to first-time visitors, who would not have visited their website before and here are the results.

Shocking results from class-leading tourism business in Scotland that should know better. And I didn’t have to look far. This was the norm rather than the exception.

You should be getting more than 75%, and prefereably above 90%. Your fully loaded time should under 7 seconds and preferably under 3. Your page size should be under 3mb, and preferably under 1mb.

So these websites are clearly underperforming when visitors arrive on them for the first time.

My website is fast I’ve tried it

If you pop over to your website now and see it loads in less than three seconds, you could be forgiven for thinking everything’s OK.

The reason you may be blissfully unaware is that browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, all artificially speed up websites because, well… we all hate slow websites don’t we!

Browser makers know you don’t like waiting for pages to load, so they save a little copy of every page you visit in case you go back to it. It’s called caching and seriously, it’s saved millions of hours of people’s lives waiting on pages to load.

While that’s a good thing, because it saves our precious time, bear in mind, it also hides your own website speed…. from you!

The killer for you, the website owner, is that you’ve almost certainly visited your own website before! So if you’re a victim of slow loading times, you may be blissfully unaware of the fact.

Unfortunately, your first-time visitors may have a painful wait.

Doc, is it curable?

Fortunately, it is fairly easy to fix, it’s not expensive and you can do it yourself. If you have WordPress, I’m going to show you how to fix it forever… in just a few minutes of your time.

How does yours measure up? Head over the GTmetrix to get your stats, and if you’ve got a downward-facing arrow next to any of your numbers, your site needs attention.

While you’re waiting, get our free instructions on ‘How to Speed Up Your Website’