How Slow Site Speed Can Hurt Your Business (+ an Infographic)

HOW SLOW SITE SPEED CAN HURT YOUR BUSINESS

Slow site speed can affect your customer engagement, your bounce rate, and your sales.

To elaborate on this, I have invited Nick Galov from Hosting Tribunal to share some really important information with you.

Take it away, Nick!

How can you improve customer engagement?

This is one question that troubles bloggers and online marketers the most – and perhaps understandably so.

Customer engagement is crucial to success for any blog site or e-store, but improving it is one tough task. This is mainly because there are several factors that can affect customer engagement, and it is often easy to miss the one that influences it most.

While content quality, site design, and interactive media all help improve your blog’s or online store’s appeal (and you should pay attention to them), they don’t affect customer engagement as much as site speed.
When you think of it, this is hardly surprising.

Today’s online users have little patience, and if there’s one thing they want more than anything else, it is access to information quickly. If a site is slow to load, they will quickly jump to another site that can provide them the necessary information, even if the former has better content or site design.

Statistics, too, point in this direction. Did you know that Hosting Tribunal reports some stupefying statistics?

1:  The bounce rate probability jumps by 106% if your page load time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds

2: The bounce rate probability soars by a whopping 123% if page load time is 10 seconds

Slow Site Speed Affects Bounce Rates

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of your total site visitors who leave your site after viewing the first page for a few seconds before navigating away. Needless to say, if a high percentage of your visitors are choosing to not spend much time on your site, you’ll struggle to improve customer engagement.

And it is not only viewers who don’t like slow sites. Google, too, might have an aversion to snail-paced websites. While slow speed might not affect your search results page ranking directly, it can still reduce the efficacy of your SEO efforts.

The impact of slow speed is even more on online stores. Research shows 79% of online shoppers don’t want to buy from a site again if the site’s performance was below their expectations.

How else does site speed affect e-commerce?

Have a look at this interesting infographic which contains loads of information regarding how page load time impacts e-commerce. Read More

5 Website Changes You Need to Make ASAP (+ a tutorial)

5 Website Changes You Need to Make ASAP

If you are a blogger and have a self-hosted website, you are considered a webmaster. As a webmaster, you are responsible for the smooth operations of your site.

To improve your site (for both yourself and for your audience), there are several things you need to do. These include optimizing your images, increasing your page speed, and adding an SSL certificate to your site. It also includes using a responsive theme and eliminating pop-ups. This last point is particularly important because Google’s algorithm update in January 2017 is going to penalize websites that have specific types of pop-ups. (We will get into this more in Point #5.)

In this article, we will look at why you should make these changes and how you can make them.

Once you have made the recommended changes, the end result will give you a better website and improve your users’ experiences! You will also avoid penalization from Google!

The following is an outline of the 5 website changes you need to make, and the sub-points included in this article:

1: Optimize and Compress Your Images

  • some notes on image optimization
  • which plugin you can use to Bulk Optimize your existing website images
  • screenshots that show you how to do this
  • How to use Pixlr Express to compress your images (a step-by-step tutorial)

2: Increase Your Page Speed

  • How to Optimize Your Site and Make it Faster

3: Add an SSL Certificate to Your Website

  • 3 Reasons Why You Need An SSL
  • How and Why I Installed an SSL on Wording Well
  • How You Can Get SSL-Certified

4: Ensure You Are Using a Responsive Theme

  • 3 tests/tools to use to check how your site looks on all devices

5: Delete Pop-Ups to Avoid Penalization from Google

  • a history of Google’s algorithm updates
  • which pop-ups will be penalized
  • which pop-ups will be allowed

5 Website Changes You Need to Make ASAP (Before January 2017) #bloggers

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DOWNLOAD THIS BLOG POST AS A PDF.

It includes a bonus section NOT INCLUDED in this post!

Read More

6 Tips for How to Improve Your Website Speed

How To Improve Your Website Speed - 6 Tips

Making your site as fast and as user-friendly as possible is the goal of many serious bloggers. Today I’m going to show you a few tools you can use to help you achieve this goal.

I’m also going to refer you to someone who can help you, because, if you are anything like me, you’d rather not do this techie stuff yourself.

Tip #1: Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Back in April 2015, Google made some changes to how websites will be ranked in the search engines. If your site is not mobile-friendly, chances are your rankings will drop. No one wants that!

Here’s a great post about making your site mobile-friendly.

Is your site mobile­-frien­dly?

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For the last few months, I’ve been slowly and steadily making changes to the overall look and function of Wording Well. I even had some work done on my site during the first week of May 2015, from the 4th to the 6th.

I hired Vinay Kachhara (Harleena Singh’s husband) from Aha!NOW to help me do this.

After reading his post How to Increase Website Speed and Make Your Blog Load Faster, I asked if he was available for hire. He was. Read More