Is Slow Website Performance Killing Your Brand?

June 23, 2016

What do you do when you land on a slow website that takes ages to load? Most likely, you leave it almost immediately.

Consider this: websites are often the first thing that connects your brand with customers. They won’t hang around forever waiting for your website to load. But that’s not all. Google’s algorithm works in such a way that it prioritizes websites that load quickly over their slow competitors. So, if your site is slow, you may be losing traffic without even knowing it and getting a sky-high bounce rate.

Find Out What’s Slowing You Down

The first step towards fixing a slow website is finding out what’s slowing it down. There are several tools to help you measure your site’s speed:

Google Webmaster and Page Speed Tools – a collection of tools to help you check your site’s load speed to determine how it compares to the rest of the Web.

GTmetrix – a free service that analyzes your site’s speed, your PageSpeed and YSlow score, and gives you customized recommendations how to make your site faster.

Pingdom Website Speed Test – checks how your website loads from different locations in the world and gives really useful insights that tell you what exactly needs fixing.

The most common issues that affect website speed are:

• The website doesn’t utilize GZIP compression and has heavy code
• You need to minify resources and reduce the number of HTTP requests
• There are uncompressed images that take up too much space and are resized in the browser
• Caching and KeepAlive aren’t configured

Now that you know what’s making your website slow, check out some of our tips and tricks to give it a boost here.