There is nothing more frustrating than a webpage with a slow load speed. A website that loads a few seconds too slow can lead to you losing potential coaching clients. Your website loading speed is a key metric of your conversion rate.
What Is Website Load Speed?
Website load speed is just the speed that your website and individual pages load. The ideal website load speed is 2-3 seconds (or faster). If your load speed is over 3 seconds, you will lose 40% of website visitors. Load speeds are particularly important for mobile users who are browsing on the go. A few seconds on a mobile device feel like a lifetime.
Why Is Website Load Speed Important for SEO?
Google prioritises user experience when determining search engine rankings, so it makes sense that they don’t want to send searchers to slow web pages. Slow load speed can damage your search engine ranking twice.
- Search engines will look at slow load speeds when calculating search ranking
- Slow load speeds increase your bounce rate which also damages your search engine ranking
Bounce rate refers to how many people click off a few seconds after navigating to your website. Search engines see the fact that people navigated away before they read anything as an indication that the page wasn’t useful or relevant to the search query. Search engines look at user activity to refine their algorithm and determine intent and context.
How to Check Your Coaching Website Load Speed?
There are plenty of websites that allow you to check your website loading speed for free. Google PageSpeed Insights is a great tool for this. It analyses your website load speed and tells you what is slowing your load speed down. The results are prioritised, so you know which issue to address first. In addition to load speed analysis, it will analyse your website’s SEO. It is possible for your website to have different load speeds for your mobile website and desktop website.
Remember, you want the load speed to be less than 3 seconds, ideally under 2, especially for sales pages or service pages.
What Factors Can Slow Down Website Load Speeds?
There are a number of factors that affect your website’s load speed. The first is media. As much as images and videos can make your website more interesting and improve your website’s SEO, they can also slow your website load speed. Optimise the size and responsiveness of the media on your website so a mobile user is not stuck waiting for a desktop-size image to load. Where you host video content or how you integrate media can also affect your website load speed.
Here are some other factors that affect your website load speeds:
- Page animation
- Your website hosting (location and server size can affect website load speeds)
- Caching
- Redirects (the more redirects you have, the slower your website load speeds)
- CMS (off-the-shelf CMS carry unnecessary code)
What To Do If Your Website Load Speed Is Slow?
Use Google PageSpeed Insights to identify what factors are slowing down your website load speed and create a plan to fix them. If you don’t have web development expertise on your team, it could be helpful to hire a web developer to create and implement an action plan. If the factors that need attention are not technical, then you could even hire a web developer to create an action plan and your team can implement it.