Is Your Website Faster than the Fastest Man in the World? It Should Be.
As the 100m sprint final of the 2015 IAAF World Championships, and numerous races before have proven, there is no beating Usain Bolt on the track.
His world record of 9.58 seconds is quite impressive, however, if Usain were in the website world,
he wouldn’t be winning any medals.
If your website loads in more than 10 seconds on a mobile device, you’ve already lost about 49% of your visitors.
Actually, 47% of visitors expect your website to load in 2 seconds or less, even on their mobile devices; and Google’s search engine now penalizes sites that take too long to load on mobile devices.
That’s right, just like Usain could lose a race in a matter of seconds, that’s all it takes to lose a lot of potential customers.
So now you’re wondering if your website is up to scratch, right? Let’s find out!
To get an idea of the actual number of seconds, open an incognito window (see image below), type in your website homepage and count the seconds it takes to load. This time may fluctuate a bit based on devices and browsers, but that exercise will give you a basic idea.
How to Open an Incognito Window
For a more technical approach, head on over to Google’s
PageSpeed Insights and enter your website domain. If your score is 84 or below (yellow or red), you’ve got to some work to do.
Along with your score, you will see a long list of recommendations of how to improve your score, but it probably looks like it’s in another language (we call it #developerese). This is where you have to make one of three choices:
1. Leave it alone.
Forget about it. You don’t mind losing a ton of customers to your competitors anyway. You didn’t get in this business to make money.
2. Set out to fix it on your own.
You may not know all the technical stuff, but if you make your way around the backend of a website, there are a few steps you can take to improve your loading time.
You can start using a Content Delivery Network like
CloudFlare (free), which has pretty simple instructions for installation here. If your site is on WordPress, you could also
get some of these awesome free plugins and make a few extra tweaks as recommended by Gregory Ciotti.
Don’t install a lot though – too many plugins can also slow down your load time.
3. Give us a call.
If the advice in point 2 made your head spin, you may want to opt out of fiddling with your site. Broken sites are no fun.
Instead,
give us a call or send us a message, and we can help make your site much faster than Usain.
The time this will take, and the cost, will vary based on the work we will have to do, but we will definitely discuss the possibilities with you beforehand, and you will rest easy knowing that your site is in good hands.
Now, who’s psyched to see our athletes run in the 2016 Olympics?!
As the 100m sprint final of the 2015 IAAF World Championships, and numerous races before have proven, there is no beating Usain Bolt on the track.
His world record of 9.58 seconds is quite impressive, however, if Usain were in the website world, he wouldn’t be winning any medals.
If your website loads in more than 10 seconds on a mobile device, you’ve already lost about 49% of your visitors.
Actually, 47% of visitors expect your website to load in 2 seconds or less, even on their mobile devices; and Google’s search engine now penalizes sites that take too long to load on mobile devices.
That’s right, just like Usain could lose a race in a matter of seconds, that’s all it takes to lose a lot of potential customers.
So now you’re wondering if your website is up to scratch, right? Let’s find out!
To get an idea of the actual number of seconds, open an incognito window (see image below), type in your website homepage and count the seconds it takes to load. This time may fluctuate a bit based on devices and browsers, but that exercise will give you a basic idea.