What the heck is website page speed, and why does it matter? It’s the speed at which each of your webpages load, and it should be quick — like less than 3 seconds quick! Did you know that 40% of consumers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a site. Think about it, three seconds is actually kind of long time to wait while staring at a blank screen. Chances are, some of that 40% could have been paying customers and clients if your website had loaded just a few seconds faster. Scary thought, huh!
Where can you go to check if you are losing website viewers?
Google Analytics is one of our favorite Google tools and your place to go to measure things like traffic and bounce rate. Once you understand how many viewers you are getting on average (traffic) and how quickly they are leaving (bounce rate), you can start to set some growth goals. Now it’s time to check your website page speed — does your website stand the test?
Where can you go to check your website page speed?
Pagespeed Insights is one of our favorite tools when it comes to checking your website page speed. It will give you a ranking of how quickly each page loads and what factors might be slowing it down. It will also give you optimization suggestions and point you to the exact piece of code causing issues.
Just a quick word of caution before you dive in. You have to be a bit of a detective when it comes to these suggestions. It can feel incredibly overwhelming at first, but we encourage you to pick the largest issues and investigate from there. Google and YouTube are your friends whenever you come across a confusing term. We’ve also found that our website platform (shout out to Showit) has some of the best customer service around when you are questioning any of these website page speed issues. So, it might be a good idea to shoot your website platform customer service team a message when you get stuck.
The most common issues we see with website page speed
- Having heavy images and videos (i.e. not compressing your content)
- P.s. did you know that GIFs are extremely heavy files? Hot tip: you should always be using MP4 files when uploading a video to your website.
- Using a lot of dynamic content — this is content that is constantly changing like your Instagram feed, a countdown timer, latest blog posts features, etc.
- Not considering mobile. Mobile processors are much smaller and it will always be harder to decrease website page speed on this device.
- Hidden content that is either inside your media libraries or off the screen of your page view. Just because it’s hidden, doesn’t mean it’s not loading behind the scenes.
If this has peaked your interest, be sure to listen to the full episode on The Duo On Air Podcast — we are sharing some of our favorite tips and tricks to help decrease your website’s page speed and turn those viewers into paying clients and customers!
If you liked today’s episode on The Duo On Air Marketing Podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review:
Programs & Products Mentioned
- Follow this path to view your website’s performance on mobile vs. desktop in Google Analytics:
- New version of Google Analytics (GA4): Tech — Tech overview (user by device)
- Universal Google Analytics: Audience — Mobile — Overview
- PageSpeed Insights: How to measure your websites page speed. Don’t forget to check each webpage.
- Compress PNG and Compress JPEG are two of our favorite free sites to compress your images prior to uploading to your website.
- Clideo is one of our favorite tools to compress your video files.
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Abbey Oslin and Courtney Petersen are Minnesota-based marketing experts, educators, and co-founders of boutique marketing agency Duo Collective, which specializes in SEO, social media strategy, and branding for small business owners and creative entrepreneurs. To learn more about Duo Collective, or to inquire about working with our team, head over to www.duocollective.com.
To inquire about being a guest on Duo On Air, please fill out this application form.
And to submit a topic or a question for next week’s episode, send us a DM on Instagram! See you on Monday!
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