Let’s face it: nobody likes a slow website.
Speed is a critical part of a website’s success, not only for usability but also from a search engine optimisation (SEO) perspective.
Studies have shown that nearly half of web users want a website to load within 2 seconds and will abandon after 3 seconds.
This can have a major impact on sales; for an e-commerce site processing $100,000 in orders per day, poor site speed could cost $2.5 million a year in sales.
A slow site doesn’t just impact the user experience; speed is a major factor in search engine rankings. Google openly states that it promotes faster sites and penalises slower sites with poor rankings, so a slow site makes it harder for people to find you in the first place.
At Mogul, we specialise in building fast websites and we have accumulated more than 10 years of experience in speeding up slow websites.
Mogul’s speed optimisation audit
First, we process your site with 4 different analysis tools. These tools help us to find exactly where the pain points are and also give us a baseline to work from.
We also conduct our own custom-designed tests to uncover any other improvements that can be made to make your website faster and more attractive to Google.
Here are some common problem areas that we see time and again when we do speed audits:
- Plugin overload: We will audit all of the plugins currently installed on your site and make sure they are being used correctly and not increasing the load times
- Too many ads: Of course there is a temptation to display ads once you’ve got high levels of traffic. However, one of the major causes of high bounce rates are slow-loading ads.
- Images: Giant graphics can grab attention and pull readers in. But large images can also make downloading the page a burdensome task. We have a range of state-of-the-art fixes to compress images while retaining the look of your site.
- Analytics code: That snippet of code you dropped across your site to measure performance might add a hair’s breadth of drag to your site speed. Maybe 100 milliseconds here. 100 milliseconds there. But when you’ve only got 2 seconds to play with, it all adds up.
- Signup forms: Forms that are pulled from external sources such as Hubspot can add increased load times.
- Affiliate code: Similar to the analytics code above, chatbots and other affiliate codes all add more external resource requests.
- Render blocking scripts: The code that makes your site look fancy (CSS) and work fancy (JS) can stop search engine robots from crawling your site effectively, leading to lower rankings.
- Hosting, DNS and caching: All of these technical things happen during the handshake between your browser and the website. They can easily lead to extra load times if they are not configured correctly.
Armed with this knowledge we can then implement a range of fixes that are specific to your site. When we’ve completed our fixes we re-evaluate your site using our audit tools. We repeat this process until we’re satisfied that your site is running sweetly.
Not what you were expecting? Our speed optimisation audit is only $650 plus GST. Talk to us info@mogul.co.nz
