Is your website fast enough?
A couple of days ago, I spoke to a friend that has two businesses. Each with its own website.
The first website is for a health centre. They are currently spending between R8 000 and R12 000 per month on Facebook ads to get visitors to their website.
The second website is a directory website where clients pay an annual fee to be listed on the website. This website gets 100s of visitors every single day.
We did a quick speed test on both sites.
- Site 1 takes 6 seconds to open.
- Site 2 takes 8 seconds to open.
This is far too slow!
Spending thousands on marketing when you have a slow website, is like pouring the most expensive sparkling water into a rusty old bucket.
It might be the best sparkling water, but barely a single drop will stay in the bucket.
It makes me angry (like Hulk-smash angry!) when I talk to business owners who are charged thousands of rands by so-called “website designers”, and then end up with a rusty old bucket.
Yes, these websites very often look good to the untrained eye.
But a website has just 3 seconds to make a first impression (which means you want your website to load in under 1.5 seconds so that you have a shot at making a great first impression).
These web designers who build pretty sites that are slow belong in the internet jail. It is criminal that they charge thousands for delivering websites that are slow.
If you are charging those prices, you better be a real expert. If you don’t even know about website load times and don’t test it, you better not run into me.
Anyway, rant over.
As you can tell, this is seriously important.
- Go to tools.pingdom.com
- Enter your website’s home page into the tool
- Choose ‘Europe – UK – London’ in the Test from the box
- Click on Start Test
You want to see the following:
- Performance Grade
- 80 or more
- Page Size
- 1.5MB or less
- Load Time
- 2 seconds or less
- Requests
- 80 or less
If any of your scores are not in this range, your website is loading too slow, and you are losing customers.
I bet you had website visitors last week that found your website too slow. You probably had website visitors yesterday that left your website because it was too slow. Heck, you might even have potential customers leaving your website right now as you are reading this.
Do the speed test.
Take a screenshot.
Email it to me, and I will give you 3 recommendations for improving your website load time.
Schedule a call with us if you would like to chat about your SEO needs.
