Are you looking for solutions to test your WordPress site speed? Do you also want to boost your WordPress site speed?
Having a fast-loading website is crucial for improving your SEO rankings, decreasing bounce rate, and increasing overall sales. If your business website page loads in more than 3 seconds, then its a high chance that your potential audiences will abandon your site and go somewhere else, and you lose an opportunity to convert. Therefore, WordPress website owners need to improve their website speed. Improving website speed by a few seconds can make a significant impact on your business. Faster page speeds will increase your Google rankings and drive more traffic to your site.
In this blog, you’ll find some fantastic tips to improve your WordPress speed and a list of excellent speed test tools for better website performance.
7 Statistics That Show How Page Load Time Impacts Conversion Rate
The faster your website speed is, the more satisfied your visitors will be. In other words, when you optimize your web page’s load time, you can expect to see improvements in user experience (UX), conversion rates, and ultimately, sales revenue.
1. According to an Unbounce survey in 2019, it was found that nearly 70% of customers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.
2. Half of the surveyed people said they’d be willing to give up animation and video for faster load times.
3. According to Portent research, Website conversion rates decreased by an average of 4.42% with every additional second of page load time (between seconds 0-5).
4. According to the reports, the average mobile web page takes 27.3 seconds to load a webpage fully.
5. Portent report suggests that the first five seconds of page-load time have the most significant influence on conversion rates.
6. Of all the people surveyed, half said they’d be willing to give up animation and video for faster load times.
7. Website conversion rates drop by an average of 2.11% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-9).
Why is it essential to have an optimized site?
How do you behave when faced with a web page that takes a long time to display? Chances are, instead of waiting a few seconds, you will click the Back button on your browser to exit it as quickly as possible. The Internet user is impatient if a web page does not appear soon.
Therefore, if your website has not been optimized, the risk that you will lose visitors (and therefore potential customers and subscribers to your newsletter) is great.
Having a site that displays quickly will allow you to:
- Reduce the bounce rate.
- Increase the number of page views.
- Improve your SEO.
Thus, selecting an optimized theme will allow your pages to load faster and benefit your visitors, your SEO, and your business.
Why is a site slow to load?
The reasons can be multiple, but for sites developed under WordPress, the most common causes of slowness are as follows:
- The selected theme uses too many plugins and therefore makes too many JS calls.
- The theme was severely coded.
- The images used are too heavy.
This article will introduce you to tools that will allow you to evaluate a WordPress theme in terms of performance and display speed.
Tools for testing the speed of a site
The idea is, therefore, to test the loading speed of a WordPress template before purchasing it. To do this, enter the address of the Demo site of the desired theme in the tools below.
It will give you reasonable indications of the performance of the chosen layout and will confirm your choice or not. Ideally, you should also evaluate your site before making any changes to make an accurate comparison.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google has implemented the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, which analyzes the content of a web page and generates suggestions to improve the loading speed of the web page.
After the analysis (for mobile and computer), if the speed is too low (between 0 and 100) & there are too many suggestions for improvements, a doubt may be expressed as to the choice of the tested theme.
Pingdom
Pingdom is a free tool that allows you to calculate the performance of a page. Simple and intuitive.
This application records the performance test histories for a given site, making it easy to follow its progress or regression following a theme modification.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix identifies the resources that are slowing down your pages. Again if a theme doesn’t score well, think twice. Its video playback feature enables you to see where the loading speed bottlenecks occur.
WebPageTest
WebPagetest is an excellent tool, like GTmetrix, providing precise information on problematic points.
It allows you to test from certain countries, so you may know how your site is performing across the world. It is helpful if your users are spread across all continents.
Optimizing the speed of a site: tips & technique
You will quickly find that optimizing page load time involves getting into fairly technical notions. We are going to talk to you about cache, script compression, etc.
If all of this is creating confusion for you, we suggest you implement some basic optimization principles, which are perhaps the easiest to access:
- Optimize images;
- Set up a cache plugin;
- Choose a good web host;
- Take stock of the WordPress plugins you use and remove unnecessary ones.
Suppose you want to build a WordPress website with faster speed & performance, Head to Seahawk Media! We are always there to help you!
