Although loss of traffic and revenue should be more than enough to convince you that speeding up your site is a good idea, there are even more reasons why site speed should be on your radar. Since the implementation of the Mobile First Index last year, site speed is a ranking factor for SEO. Not only does Google want to promote excellent user experience, but a slow site will be slower to crawl, which will negatively effect how many of your site pages Google can find. Therefore, a slow site will rank lower, further reducing your traffic and conversions. Slow sites are a slippery slope.
There are a number of reasons why a site would be slow to load. Perhaps you have too many large images, lots of products to load, or slow hosting. Sometimes, it’s simply the case that your site was built a long time ago, and was never optimised for speed. Many of the actions that we would recommend to speed up a page’s load time deal directly with the way the site is built. It’s never recommended to make changes to your CSS or HTML without knowing how to fix a site if you break it.
Speeding up the site requires an audit to analyse exactly what is taking the site so long to load, and then working on the site. It’s likely you’ll need to minify the css, reduce image sizes and clean up the plugins you’re using, in addition to a multitude of other internal fixes. We’d always recommend you get an expert to do this to make sure that you get the most improvement on your site.
