Let’s make your website speed optimized so you don’t have to loose out potential customers.
Your website speed plays an important role in many factors like visitor ease-of-ese, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and conversion. I strongly believe every website should do something to help its loading time, no matter how small.
A slow, unoptimized website isn’t good for anyone involved. When a website is slow, visitors get annoyed and impatient while having to wait for the website to load. This slow speed either leaves a bad impression – or no impression at all because the user has already left and forgotten your website resulting in a loss in conversions.
Positively, a faster website improves SEO which means your website will be seen further up in the Google search results resulting in more traffic for your business. One question remains – how slow is your website?
Compressing images to saves as many kilobytes as possible, increasing image load times on your website.
Reducing the size of your website’s code files by compressing them reducing the filesize of them making them load faster.
Loading your functional JS files at the same time as other files, to bypass the file loading queue.
Disabling unnecessary files that being loaded across your site to reduce the amount files being loaded, speeding up your website.
Optimize the intrinsic size of images to only have the quality necessary without it looking blurry to reduce the image file sizes.
Reduce unnecessary page elements that provide little user value for the network weight of files they require to speed up your website.
When your site is slow, there’s always a reason why. Sometimes it’s one big issue that’s causing all the problems, but most likely it’s a bunch of little things that haven’t had enough attention that’s causing your issues.
When it comes to hosting, you get what you pay for. It can be annoying that when you’re getting your website online for the first time you learn that you have to buy a domain and hosting before anyone can see it. After already spending money on the website itself, you might have leaned towards cheaper hosting options for your business’s website.
This is where people make their first mistake, buying cheap hosting. Godaddy and BlueHost are cheap and there’s a reason why – it’s called shared hosting. Having shared hosting slows down your site because your site gets thrown in a giant theoretical pile of thousands of other websites; all competing for server requests, resources, and memory. Having dedicated hosting is very important if you want your website to be as fast as possible because it means your server space is running on allocated hardware just for YOUR site and your site alone.
Once people get their website they get very excited. So excited in fact, they load it with a bunch of bells and whistles with these things called plugins. This is especially the case with slow WordPress websites because of how easy it is to do. When I create websites for our clients, I make a point to not install plugins unless it’s necessary. I always try to keep them to a minimum so the site is faster, and overall easier to work with a maintain.
It’s easy to think that installing 25 different security plugins can make your website as secure as The White House but in actuality, it slows your site down massively and doesn’t provide any more security than if you only had one security plugin installed. It’s common mistakes like these that can quickly make your website slower and slower.
Many WordPress themes are built with loads of functionality, so much so it affects the site load speed. These massive themes come with the cost of having to add more complexity that negatively affects the speed of the website, even before you customize it. For someone like me who takes speed very seriously, selecting a fast theme is very important. Speed being very important to me, I go as far as Speed Audit the theme demo before considering it just to make sure it fits our standards.
“Multi-purpose” is something I look out for when selecting a theme because multi-purpose built themes tend to be over-customizable and bloated with different unnecessary options and content that slow down the site. You should avoid these multi-purpose themes because they usually have massive CSS files for styling which enables the theme to have many different style options available. If your website is only going to one style, why load the other styles? This is what makes multi-purpose themes slow.
A typical website takes around 1-3 hours to speed optimize. Additional time can be expected depending on how many pages the website has and how complex the website is.
At my hourly rate ($60 an hour), you can expect it to be around $60-$200.
After your website has been speed optimized I can suggest case-specific ways to improve your website speed further to go the extra mile!
