![\"website](\"https:\/\/www.dotcom-tools.com\/web-performance\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/slow-website-facts2.jpg\" "\\"website")
<\/p>\nWe\u2019ve all done it \u2013 given up on a website because it wasn\u2019t loading quickly enough. We don\u2019t even think twice. It doesn\u2019t make much difference to our lives. But to the business whose website we\u2019ve just abandoned, it\u2019s a huge problem.<\/p>\n
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You want potential customers to stay on your site, learning about your products and buying them. That\u2019s the whole reason you have a website in the first place. So when you lose visitors to slow load times, your business is going to take a hit.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, you can control and fix the things that are slowing down your website speed.<\/p>\n
Is there a speed issue with your home page? Product pages? In the checkout process? You can\u2019t be sure without testing. And we all know that trying to fix a page that isn\u2019t broken is probably going to break the page.<\/p>\n
A website speed monitoring tool, like Dotcom-Monitor\u2019s BrowserView can continuously check your website\u2019s speed and let you know when there\u2019s a problem. Or use Dotcom-Monitor\u2019s free Website Speed Test for periodic testing. Both solutions will provide you with a comprehensive waterfall chart for tracking down the source of the issues.<\/p>\n
Pictures carry a lot of weight with potential customers. They also take longer to load than text, so prioritize your images. Product photos are mission-critical for your business. A sticker promoting a sale, or driving traffic to your Facebook page can be replaced with text without damaging the site\u2019s aesthetic appeal.<\/p>\n
Be sure to resize photos to the correct size before uploading them to the site. Uploading a large photo that the HTML has to shrink down to the correct size slows down your website speed.<\/p>\n
Your markup language, that is. Your developers keep their code as clean as possible to maximize website speed. And then business users mess everything up with code that they don\u2019t even know exists. When they paste text directly from a word processing program into your Content Management System (CMS), that text comes with formatting codes that do nothing but give web browsers more code to wade through when loading a page.<\/p>\n
Teach your business users to paste their text into a Text Editor to strip out formatting, and then copy that text to paste into the CMS. This process takes seconds to perform, so there\u2019s minimal impact to workflow.<\/p>\n
Plugins make it fast and easy to add functionality to your site. But they can significantly reduce website speed. Delete any plugins that you don\u2019t really need. For the ones you decide to keep, disable them one at a time and test your website speed each time to see which ones are slowing down your site. Then find replacements for the offending plugins.<\/p>\n
Your customers may need multiple visits to your site before they decide to buy, especially for high end products and services. When you enable caching for your site, a visitor\u2019s browser will cache certain page elements (such as images). That means your site will load much more quickly for returning visitors.<\/p>\n
Making these changes can shave seconds off your website load time. That sounds insignificant until you remember that those seconds seem like minutes to anyone waiting for a page to load. These improvements can improve conversion rates and give a healthy boost to your company\u2019s profits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you lose visitors to slow load times, your business is going to take a hit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":15575,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"template-url.php","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[40,4],"tags":[42,63],"yoast_head":"\r\n