I’ve read a lot of articles on what are the benefits of a high speed optimized site, and some people really stretch their lists out. I’m going to keep it a bit simple here and explain why you should have a speedier site, how to tell if your site is fast, and maybe a few tips toward speeding up your website.
In a way, this post was inspired by my post called Dear Newbie Bloggers: When Money is on your Mind, Have Patience, where I addressed a huge issue of balancing making money versus user experience. A lot of bloggers choose to join ad networks that often slow down their site, and sometimes ruin their search results because of the lure of ad networks promising better payout. The tracking codes are extremely bulky, and even optimizing with cache plugins and other methods, are rendered useless.
So, in a way, this is a companion piece to explain the importance of a faster website for your visitors.
What are the benefits of a high speed optimized website?
The benefits of an high speed optimized website all boil down to:
- Better User experience
- Better website conversions
- Good for your web hosting
- Good for Google
Better User experienced
A fast site means better user experience for your visitors on any device (mobile, tablet, desktop.) Unfortunately, people are impatient. So, if your site is slow, a lot of people may not stay to wait for a page to load.
Better website conversions
People are more apt to do something on your site if they don’t need to wait much for it to load. The act of someone doing something on your website, whether it’s buying something, subscribing to your newsletter, sharing your articles, filling out a form, or leaving a comment, all fall under website conversion. This should be an end goal for your website, and if people are leaving your site because it’s slow, then you’re pretty much missing out on a potential return on investment.
Good for your web hosting
Having a speedy site is great use of your web hosting resources. A cached site saves bandwidth, as your web host server is delivering a saved copy of your site, rather than freshly calling all the code from the database and files on each visit.
Good for Google
A blazing fast site is good for Google? Heck yeah it is! Google rank actually includes the speed of site. You can fiddle with all the possible ways to optimize your site, and test it, but how fast your site loads up for your visitors is an extremely important factor.
Google may have a lot of tools, but in the end, it’s actual humans that have to visit and either suffer on your site, or have a fast, fantastic experience. Google is designed to offer a better ranking for people who are delivering websites for humans, rather than playing some SEO-game that won’t attract people to click on their search result.
Now that you know what the benefits are?
How do you speed up your website?
When people ask my how I speed up my site, I direct them to a Slideshare presentation I made, called Introduction to Optimizing WordPress for Site Speed.
A lot of it is choosing a good host, a great lean theme, a solid plugin stack, and using a cache plugin, and a plugin that shuts off plugin scripts page by page so there’s no extra load time.
You’re also welcome to ask me on my plugin stack, in the comments below.
For my theme, I use the StudioPress Genesis Framework (I use a child theme that I added further customizations to.) I have for years, and it’s the only theme I use for my clients. As for the cache plugin, I use WP Rocket. Both are premium paid items, and to be fully transparent, are my affiliate links in case you want to use them.
If you don’t know how to optimize your site, or have tried, and still have trouble, you can hire me. I have a WordPress speedup service that is like $150.
Have you optimized your site so it’s faster? How did you do that?
Cache plugin is so important – any time I forget to reactivate my caching plugin after any testing, it’s crazy to see how much it changes the page load speed! Appreciate all the reminders here.
Hi Nile,
Again, an interesting post. Optimizing and speeding up a website is not that easy, it requires a lot of experience and skills as well. The fast loading speed of the website is always good for users. Google also valued it and it helps to boost Keyword ranking. I used the WP Rocket premium plugin too for my blog but I always use this cache plugin with the help of a web developer to optimize my blog. Also, I recommend your service. It’s worth using it.
Thank you.
Thanks & Regards,
Anoop Gupta
A high-speed optimized website always has a better experience for the users. It’s good for google ranking and many more things
Thank you!
I will try your suggestion!
Hope it good for my site.
I will keep this in mind. I do want to have a faster website for sure.
This post is really informative. Thanks for sharing this information.
I agree to all these. Faster website is a must. I’ll keep these in mind.
Wow, learn a lot from this. The cache plugin is so important in speeding and optimizing your website. Thanks a lot.
If a website is too slow, it turns off customers and may cost a business sales. This service you offer seems like something that will be beneficial to many businesses.
This is a really important post, making sure your website is speedy and easy to navigate is going to help you keep people coming back!
It seems like faster is better when it comes to websites!
Yes, it’s so true. A good website is everything! I’ve learned so many useful things from this post!
This is awesome ! I have been trying to speed up my site so I’ll keep these in mind
Great post! I really need to get a high speed optimized website for my blog. It runs way too slowly.
This is definitely something important to consider when it comes to optimizing your website. I notice a lot of websites with issues and it can be frustrating.
Hello Nile,
Thank you so much for the awesome content that you have provided us.
You have put a lot of efforts to provide the benefits of a high-speed optimized website. The article is really helpful for bloggers like us.
Thank you for this amazing article. I hope you will continue to write such good articles as well.
Wow! This is such a great post with a handful of information that we could actually use. Thanks for sharing.
I agree with you, a fast site makes visitors happy. I tend to close the window if the page doesn’t fully load within 3 seconds.
Good article, a website had to load fast to keep users in your site.
Slow websites leads to high bounce rate and turn off customers which isn’t good for business.
As for caching my website, I used W3 Total cache pluggin.
Some times I also reduce the sizes of images I upload to my website using reduce images sizes dot com.
Nice blog post, thanks
To be honest I take speed optimized pretty seriously. Its from my own experience, if Im surfing the web an encounter a website that takes too much time to load, I will close it ASAP without doubt.
There are only benefits and the guide is very good. Probably the only action that is missing is related to DNS optimization, for instance some of the largest domain registrars have the slowest DNS and this increase the time of first bytes sent.
Hi John!
This is more geared for beginners. DNS optimization is a bit more advanced for this particular article.
I take site optimization very seriously. It’s very important that the site load in no time. Great article
Yeah, it looks good when your site is user friendly and when your website have very good speed
We tried and employ a host of approaches to increase speed, cache plug-in, dedicated host, although we still suffer from too many plug-ins and a slightly bloated theme. I can attest, however, that the increase in traffic we’ve seen over the past two quarters coincides with speeding up our site. Thanks for the article–great overview.