Make sure your website is fast
Without a doubt the speed of broadband and 4G is increasing in the UK, with most areas now covered by fibre. With the introduction of 5G in the next 3 years, things are looking good for this nation. At home, in my garden I get a blistering 4G download of 80mbs – which is faster than some fibre connections, not that it helps me cut my lawn though, that still takes me ages!
Speed is king!
With download speeds increasing there is a temptation for website designers to use 4K images and design pages that are huge, although this can look amazing, it’s not always a good thing. Keeping your website relatively lean is important and will ultimately help you convert more visitors into customers and get more sales.
Reason no.1 to make your website load quickly
Over 50% of traffic to your website is likely to be from a mobile or tablet device, but don’t assume this will be on WIFI. Many web searches start on mobile from a 3G connection, so if your website doesn’t load quickly your visitor will soon give up. Slow to load websites are one of top frustrations for mobile users. You’ve got less than 3 seconds to make the initial impression, or they’ll just click back.
When you get your designer to create your new website, tell them it’s for mobile first, it’s an approach that should make them think more about making the site load quickly.
Reason no.2 to make your website load quickly
Google is watching. At some point this year Google will be changing its search results to a mobile first index. What this means is that sites that are created to perform well on mobile (this includes loading quickly) will be part of the index. But a stern warning to other sites that are not, they will be devalued over time.
How does my website fare?
It’s quite easy to check how quickly your website loads, there are a few tools that we use on a regular basis. The Google mobile friendly test is a good place to start https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly – this will be the benchmark that Google will use to determine whether your site is acceptable or not when the change over to the mobile index happens. The other tool we use is https://tools.pingdom.com/ which is very helpful isolating the reason why the website takes too long to load, sometimes it’s images, scripts, a plugin or DNS.