How Can Website Speed Affect Your Online Business? Tips To Speed Up Your Website

Your website is your asset. It reflects your business and keeps visitors coming back for more. Today there is a lot of competition going on between businesses on the internet. While companies launch their websites to gain market share, website speed plays an essential role in overall business success.

A website’s speed can include downloading speed and its time to load a web page. A good website speed should be high up on the mark to deliver a good website experience.

Have you ever thought about the speed of your website?

If not, let’s look at how your site speed can affect your business and what you should do to speed up your website.

The Impact of Slow Websites

Two to four seconds of the website loading time is considered ideal for any business website. According to the study, a website loading 1.7 seconds is faster than 75% of global websites. And a website loading in 5 seconds is faster than 25% of global websites. Even a delay of one or two seconds in loading time can hurt user engagement and generate revenues.

In other words, a slow website is a bad news for businesses in numerous ways that are following:

Loss of Traffic

Users tap through web pages at lightning speed for desktop or smartphone users. A slow website can irritate anyone. The digital age reinforced the necessity of immediate gratification, so now, many users can’t wait more than 8 seconds on a loading web. This likely explains why 80% of users who experienced a slow website never return.

As a result, there is a loss of incoming traffic, leading to lower conversions rates and engagement. Ultimately, these factors can finish with lower sales, loss of revenues, and poor brand reputation.

Affect Your Ranking

Starting a business website is an easy task, but the ranking of your website is quite complex. And here SEO comes into play. SEO should be one of your top priorities for your website.

So, how much have you invested in search engine optimization until now?

One of the main reasons for poor ranking in SERP is your site speed? Google only gives a better ranking to the websites with excellent loading speed. A better ranking from search engines means more traffic and user clicks.

On the other hand, even if your website has good content but has poor speed, it will not rank better in SERP. So, better SEO makes your website more visible to the users trying to find you.

Poor Customer Experience

In the last couple of years, studies have concluded that the average attention duration of human beings is reduced to 8 seconds. It means your website visitors will lose interest after 8 seconds if your website is not loaded.

A slow website can damage the overall user experience. Most users are not likely to return on the same slow website, or worse, switch to a competitor website with a better user experience. Poor user experience also leads to negative reviews and referrals that can damage your reputation and prevent users from engaging with your business.

High Bounce Rates

A website bounce happens when a visitor leaves your website without performing any activity.

A high bounce rate is recorded when most visitors leave the website after opening a single page and don’t click any element like links, menus, and CTA’s.

A slow website is one of the reasons for the high bounce rate. Unfortunately, a high bounce rate will reduce your visitors’ engagement to the website, and ultimately it leads to lower conversion and sales.

Crashing or Blacklisting

If your website is slow, it might be because of undetected malware. Hackers nowadays have developed new strategies to add malware and other viruses to the website that are difficult to detect even after penetrating a particular website.

Detection of malware in your website could result in the suspension of your site by your web host. And also, google will blocklist your site by considering it a dangerous site to protect other users. A blacklist website can completely stop the traffic.

If you choose AEserver UAE-based hosting, you will be facilitated with a site lock security tool that automatically scans your website for malware and lets you know if there are any security breaches.

Related: URL Blacklist: What It Is & How to Prevent It

Essential Tips To Speed Up Your Website

Now that you have understood the impacts of a slow website, let’s look into some essential tips to speed up your website.

Check Your Hosting Platform

If you have read our previous articles, you must know the importance of choosing a good host for your website.

A good server behind your website plays a vital role in your website performance. If your website is slow, it might be because of the hosting plan you’re using. For instance, if your website is on a shared platform with limited resources and disk space, and higher website traffic, your website will become slow. It will be good to move to a faster and more efficient platform.

What’s better than cheap hosting and quality hosting at once? If you don’t want to move to an expensive platform like a private cloud but want excellent site performance, then AEserver’s shared hosting will work great.

Delete Unused Themes and Plugins

Look into all your installed plugins and themes and delete those that are no longer relevant because these plugins and themes can overload the site’s memory.

On the other hand, use only high-quality themes and plugins from trusted resources optimized for speed and do not overload your server.

Cache Up

The cache is the process of storing information on a user’s device to load faster. For this, you can use plugins like WP super cache, WP Rocket, or W3 Total Cache. These plugins are great for speed optimization and use a range of measures like caching, slow loading of images, image compression, and so on.

Optimize for Mobile

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Because now most users would like to access the internet through mobile, not desktop.

There is no use of a fast-performing website if it’s not responsive per device and screen size. As most of the web traffic is coming through mobile devices, you may lose your visitors if your website won’t load faster on their mobile.

Compress Text and Images

Unnecessary images and videos files are the main culprits of site slowdowns. Converting and decreasing image size and scale can help you alot to cope with this problem.
Also, removing any video files that aren’t critical to your website content can dramatically help. You can implement lazy loading, so the content load as the user scrolls down the page.

Wrapping Up

To summarize, website speed should matter for every business. Being a website owner, if your website has the best design globally, but it loads very slowly on users’ devices, it will hurt your business.

On the other hand, a fast-loading website can be beneficial for business success as it improves traffic, customer engagement, etc.

If you have a WordPress site, then the game is much easier for you to choose managed WordPress hosting combined with external services to improve your website performance and security.

Now, what are you waiting for? Choose AEserver’s hosting plan and boost the speed of your website today!