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Loading speed has long been seen as one of the most important things for any online business to improve on, whether you’re Microsoft or a Mom and Pop store in small-town Pennsylvania. A couple of years ago, CNBC reported that most online shoppers won’t wait any more than 5 seconds for a page to load. This figure has fallen year-on-year as sites up their game and consumer expectations grow. One thing that seems certain is that in 2020, no shoppers will wait more than five seconds.
Speeding up your website is an absolute must and doing it right will also have an appreciable knock-on effect on your SEO score. Here are three suggestions to help you improve both those things and more.
Put your website under the microscope with Google
All website owners should familiarize themselves with the full suite of Google’s web testing tools to kickstart their own process. There are two tests you need to know about when it comes to improving site speed. Running some page analysis via Google’s site speed test can give you some useful entry-level recommendations, couple this with Google’s mobile-friendly test, and you’re some way towards improving page loading speeds for mobile phone users.
In 2019, several SEO experts converged on the idea of mobile-friendliness as the most important area of focus for anyone looking to rank higher in Google search and improve on-site user experience. And with the average mobile page taking much longer to load (15.3 seconds according to Google), there’s certainly room for improvement.
Fix broken links
Screaming Frog’s broken link checker is a great tool that can help you to identify problem links on your site. By amending your 301 redirects and 404 server errors, you’re getting rid of a significant drain on your bandwidth and removing some of the most negative user experiences visitors will have on your site.
Buy managed hosting
Purchasing managed hosting is a more expensive, but more surefire way of upping your server capacity and improving the technical fundamentals of your website. Buying a package from a reputable hosting platform like Onyx.io can give you vast amounts of server space and improve your overall bandwidth.
Best of all, hosting providers allow your website to leverage this increased capacity in the optimum way. By fine tuning complicated processes like caching for you, they all-but guarantee that your site will have better loading times, no matter how many new visitors you end up getting. It can seem like a hefty upfront cost, but it’s an investment that’s worthwhile if you’re looking to improve your online visibility and grow your web traffic in the long run.
Whether it’s taking stock via Google analytics tools, spending some time tweaking on-site issues or investing some capital in better hosting services, 2020 is the time to focus on page loading speeds and focus on them fast. By improving user experience across your site, you’ll reduce your bounce rate, crack down on pogo-sticking, and increase dwell time.
We are influencers and brand affiliates. This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.
I am interested in all things technology, especially automation, robotics and tech that helps change how society will live in the future.