If you’ve ever been to a website that took a long time to load, then you know how frustrated your patients are if your site is taking too long to display. Having a slow site speed is more than an annoyance to visitors, it can actually affect your SEO in a negative way. Google algorithms are designed to find sites that offer the best user experience and pages that take a while to load is not considered a good user experience.
How do I Know My Site Speed?
To know how fast your website is loading, you can use a free tool like GTmetrix. Just put the URL to your website in the field that says “Enter URL to Analyze” and click “Test Your Site”. The site will give you a score. Also, it will give you a list of things that need to be updated to increase your speeds.
As part of our SEO services, we check the speed on your site and then do what’s necessary to make it load faster. Since it is important to your SEO, we offer this is part of our monthly services.
How Fast Should a Website Load in 2020?
The goal for your site speed should be 3 seconds or less. If it takes longer than that, you can lose up to 40% of your visitors. Essentially, the faster it can load, the better.
Why Do Websites Take So Long to Load?
There are a lot of reasons that your site speed could be slow. Most often, it is related to large images and videos on the site. Other things can include:
- Host company
- Too many plugins
- JavaScript Issues
- Excessive HTTP Requests
- Unnecessary coding
- Ad heavy
These are a few of the things that can slow down your site speed and cause longer load times.
How Can I Increase My Site Speed?
Since site speeds are usually due to technical issues, you’ll likely need a developer to make the updates. There are several things that can be done to increase page speeds including:
- Install a caching plugin – this plugin will store a cached version of the site so it doesn’t have to load the elements of the site.
- Compress images – the optimal image size should be less than 500 kilobytes or 0.5 megabytes. There are plugins that you can install that will automatically compress your images. Or, if you need to keep your plugin count down, then you can resize the images before you upload to the site.
- Remove unused plugins- the fewer plugins, the better. The rule of thumb is to have less than 20 plugins installed. Shoot for closer to 5 if you can. Delete any that you are not using.
- Delete extra code – when a site is created, there are many lines of coding, some of which is not necessary. A developer can go in and clean up the unnecessary coding. Also, if you are typing your content into a Word document or Google document, it can add coding that’s not necessary. To avoid this, you can type your content directly into the page or post you are creating.
These are a few of the things that a developer can do to help the pages on your website load faster.
Contact us Today For Ongoing SEO
When you use our services, we’ll make sure that your site health is good. It’s important for your SEO, so we monitor site speeds and errors. Get in touch with the team here at Functional Medicinse SEO today. We’d love to offer you a free SEO site audit. All you need to do to receive the audit is sign-up here and we’ll send you information on how the audit.
