If your website is dragging and taking too long to load chances are your customers are leaving before the homepage is done loading.
In this post I’m going to share a WordPress speed optimization tip (that you can start using today) and some tools that will help improve the page load speed of your site and help with SEO rankings as well.
People don’t have the patience anymore for a page that loads slow and they won’t even hesitate to click the back button and find another website. Unfortunately, it’s so easy to judge other websites on how slow they load but are you taking at look at your own business website?
At first glance WordPress speed optimization may not seem like a big deal, but under the covers it may even make or break a business. If you are getting visitors to your website and your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you are losing about 57% of your visitors to a competitor or they’ll just simply abandon your site all together.
Statistics show that 80% of these people will never return to your site.
It’s almost like fast loading websites are not a luxury anymore, it’s necessity and you need to do something about it unless you don’t care about losing money or business.
One of the most common culprits to a slow loading website is the images.
Many times, the images used on WordPress sites are not optimized for the web, they are oversized when they could be cropped or uploaded in high resolution when it doesn’t need to be. I have some blog posts where image sizes are not consistent and have mismatched sizes from post to post, loaded in its native full resolution and can easily take 5-10 seconds to load one page.
In today’s world, no one is going to wait that long.
Here are a couple of options that can help.
- WordPress Plug-ins
- Online Image Optimizers
WordPress Plug-ins
Here are a few WordPress plug-ins that make image optimization much easier to deal with:
Online Image Optimizers
If you don’t want to install a WordPress plugin or you are using another website platform, there are also online image optimization solutions as well:
Conclusion
Don’t let huge images and slow load times on your website be the reason you are losing customers. Take this post as a reminder and optimize your site. If you need some help with this, shoot me an email.
- Non-optimized images can be a major culprit to poor website performance
- A slow loading website can negatively affect your website ranking in search engines
- Your audience will not stick around for your slow website to load
- If your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 57% of your visitors will abandon your website
- Use a good quality WordPress plug-in to help with image optimization
- If you don’t want to use a plug-in, there are many online tools (free and paid) that can get the job done
If you have other great image optimization tools that you would like to share below in the comments, please do. Also if you see someone else with a slow website, please share this post as a friendly reminder for them as well.
Nobody likes a slow website! 🙂