Did you know that ongoing scientific studies have shown that between 2000 and 2016, the average human attention span dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds?

This means that as a website owner, you have a very short time to show users your content and convince them to stay on your website.

According to a StrangeLoop case study that involved Amazon, Google, and other larger sites, a 1 second delay in page load time can lead to 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

In terms of SERPS placement, Google and other search engines have already started penalizing slower websites by pushing them down in the search results which means lower SERPs ratings for slow websites, regardless of how great and well-optimized their content might be.

The time it takes for your site to load is critical to making a sale. As much as 88% of users choose an online store based on the experience, being that this is both user-friendly and high-performance.  Nearly half of page visitors will abandon the site completely if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Of course!

Completing a sale is all about user experience. Of all mobile users in the US, there is an average of 1.4 hours every day spent browsing via mobile. This being said, your site needs to be fast on BOTH mobile and desktops.

A CDN is a Content Delivery Network. Most big blogs use them. It takes all the static files you’ve got on your site and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.

Yes, the theme does affect page speed. The theme should be just what you need and nothing more. Or get a lightweight theme and add functionality via plugins. Then you can keep things lean and lightweight.

Often people think that their WordPress website is performing well in the speed department just because it doesn’t seem slow on their computer. However, that’s a HUGE mistake.

As you frequently visit your own website – or you should  – most browsers – including Chrome and Firefox – store your website in their cache memory and automatically ‘prefetch ‘it as soon as you start typing an address. This then loads your website almost instantly, giving the illusion that everything is fine. However, a new user who is visiting your website for the first time may not have the same experience at all.

To find out how fast your WordPress site is for these users, you need to test it. There are a number of free online tools you can use to do that. These tools will test speeds from different locations as well if you like, something that is very useful for those whose site is designed to appeal to a national, or even international audience rather than a local one.

WordPress does offer numerous plug-ins that can help with speed optimization. Although these plug-ins can help improve webpage loading speed, it may not identify the root of the problem. Our WordPress Speed Optimisation Services can help identify those issues and help you gain a faster loading speed.

First impressions are everything. A slow page leads to an increase in bounce rate and loss of potential sales. A slow site can come off as untrustworthy or unsafe. Customers will slowly stop referring your service to others because of a poor experience, and established websites are less likely to link back to your content.

As time goes on, users expect faster and better experiences. For 2019, many users expect that a page should load in under a second. With this speed expectation, it is critical to be fully optimised.

Ideally, the maximum amount of time it should take to load a page on your site is 2 seconds. But even that is a little on the slow side these days. Basically, there is no such thing as a site that’s too fast, so the very best answer to this question would be as fast as you can get it.

This is the time, or the gap, between the expected page load time and actual page load time. This gap should be under 2 seconds for optimal performance. If this gap passes that 2-second mark, it can be expected a visitor will abandon the page.

Your site may be running slowly for a number of different reasons:

Web Hosting – When your web hosting server is not properly configured, it can hurt your website speed.

WordPress Configuration – If your WordPress site is not serving properly cached and optimized pages, then it will overload your server, causing your website to run slowly or crash entirely.

Page Size – Your pages are just too large in size, usually due to the inclusion of images that aren’t optimized for the web.

Bad Plugins – If you’re using a poorly coded, or outdated plugin, then it can significantly slow down your website, as can using too many of them in general.

External scripts – External scripts such as ads, font loaders, and other extras can also have a huge impact on your website’s speed performance.

Sign-up forms may only add a few lines to website core files. When too many single-lines of code take space on the website back-end, web content assets and plugins with lengthy code end up competing for memory spaces in short processing cycles.

There are three different types of hosting:

• Shared hosting — Your site is on the same server as a number of other websites and needs to share its resources with everyone else. This can lead to “bad neighbor” effects where one site is hogging the majority of resources and downtimes due to overload.
• Virtual private server (VPS) — You usually have fewer sites on the same server. Resources are allocated evenly across all sites present without the option to exceed them.
• Dedicated server — You have one server just for you.

In an ideal world, perhaps there might be a WordPress plugin that was called “SuperSpeed” or something similar that would speed up your site instantly. The fact is though, there isn’t and there likely never will be because there are so many factors that can slow down a website.

There are definitely some great plugins out there that can improve caching, and that will help, but you’ll also need to optimize your images, check all your plugins, track down bad code and make all kinds of changes to the actual function of your site to get the best possible speeds. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also very important work as the speed of your WordPress website is every bit as important in terms of SEO as the content you display on it.

Yes!

It can be tempting to sell space to third-party advertisers on your page. Too many ads or slow to load ads can greatly affect your page load speed. Either of these can cause an increase in bounce rate from site visitors.

Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft.” This is when other sites direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your server load increasingly high.

No.

Your page loading speed can change after it has already been optimised. This changes by any changes you make to the webpage along with other factors. The webpage needs to be maintained; a site’s loading speed can increase by 22% annually without proper maintenance.

Google has stated on the record that page loading speed is an SEO ranking signal (and they recently made PageSpeed even MORE important). You can boost your site speed by using a CDN, compressing images, and switching to faster hosting.

Make sure your site doesn’t take more than 4 seconds to load: MunchWeb found that 75% of users wouldn’t re-visit a site that took longer than 4 seconds to load.

You can easily check your site’s loading speed using the excellent GTMetrix.com.