Your Website Needs to be more like Usain Bolt

Be like Usain!

It’s evident that Usain Bolt is fast. Your website should be fast too.

We’re a demanding society. We want everything now. Not tomorrow. Not five minutes from now. Today.

Your current and potential clients are those very same people. They want to get the information they so dearly seek right away.

If you have a slow loading website, they’re not going to stick around. They’re gone and onto the next website. It happened so fast they couldn’t even break your heart.

But it should still hurt you knowing that people are leaving your site before it even loads. I’m sure you would feel offended if someone walked into your storefront or office, stood there for five seconds and left. You didn’t even give them a chance to tell them how great you are.

Not only are you losing out on sales and new clients with a slow website, you could very well be effecting your search rankings.

Yep. Back in 2010 Google started to factor in webpage load times for search rankings.

It makes sense after all. Google’s search goal is to give its searchers the most relevant results as soon as possible. If you’re site loads too slow, then people aren’t going to be happy with Google and their results.

At the end of the day it’s all about that potential customer and getting the information they want as soon as possible.

Test Your Websites Loading Speed

 
There are few ways you can test your websites loading times. The first tool is free (thanks to Sean Davis for making me aware of this tool) is Pingdom. It’s another one of my ten best free internet marketing tools.

Once you enter your website into the form Pingdom will test your site and you’ll get your grade. Remember this is just for your main domain. You might have separate webpages on your site that are loading slow. So it’s not a bad idea to test all on your webpages.

Below that will be a bunch of gibberish that has to do with website coding. You won’t understand it so don’t worry about it.

Here is my grade below as of today.

My Pingdom results

Not bad but I want to improve that. If your grad is less than 60 out of 100 or your website loads slower than I suggest you read Sean’s post where he’ll give you a few ways to improve your websites speed.

Kinsta has a great post breaking down Pingdom tools results which I suggest you read.

Using Google Analytics

 
There is another way you can see how fast your website and pages are loading. That’s in Google Analytics. Refer to this post on how to setup and navigate Analytics.

On the left hand side in your dashboard you’ll see a “Content” tab. Click on that and you’ll see the “Site Speed” tab.

Google Analytics site speed

Then click on the pages link to see how your entire website’s pages loads

My webpages load times

Once again page loading speed is for those visiting your website and for Google. It’s not to piss both off with slow loading times. So take the advice from Sean Davis or seek someone out to improve your websites speed.