You click through to her website. You know what, this is it. This is the service you have been looking for all your life because she just said so in her post.

And why the hell is this website taking so long to load?

Oh, it’s probably just a one-off. It may be my internet connection, or my mobile.

Then you click on another page.

And it’s still sooooo slow.

Then You Leave

If you really believe that this solution will solve every problem in your entire universe, then maybe you’ll persevere. But if it’s not, you know what, I saw her competitor sell something really similar, so I don’t have to put up with this slow website. Let’s check out the competitor.

This is your thinking. Okay, I admit this is my thinking, and I’m not the only one. I have landed on a slow website. I have initially thought, oh, my internet is acting up.

Am I on my Wi-Fi? Am I on my mobile data?

If it’s been that slow, I have left, gone elsewhere.

Or you know what, I haven’t got time for this now. I was only just going there because I thought this was going to be a quick thing. This is taking me too long. I’ll come back later.

You know what? Later doesn’t happen.

Why Website Speed Matters More Than Ever

This is why it is really important for your website to be fast from a user experience point of view.

As far as search engines are concerned, you get way more boost. They love it when you’re quick, especially on a mobile. If it’s a slower website, they wonder if they are not paying attention to it. Why is it so slow? Part of what search engines are looking for is usability. They want the website to be fast.

I know some websites may be taking a hit at the moment because of the AI summaries at the top of Google Search Engine, but it’s still important for your website to be fast.

You may have a website that you’re promoting mainly through search engines, but a lot of the time I’m seeing links in social media, in blog posts. It’s important for your users to have a fast website.

You don’t want to manage to get to the top of Google, or be paying for ads, when your website is so slow that when people get there, they’re just leaving.

How to Check Your Own Website Speed

If you’re concerned that you have a slow website, there are a few checks that you can run. The average speed for a website is under 2 seconds, so you can use that as a benchmark. If it’s an online shop, then you want to be even faster.

Google PageSpeed Insights

This is a free service that performs the speed check on one page. You simply enter your website page, then click on analyze. 

The results are numbers and a traffic light system, with red being bad and green being good. There are also actual numbers as well.  

Below the results are a list of suggestions to make your website faster. There’s a little bit of jargon there as well, so you may need some help interpreting some of it because it loves its acronyms.

GTmetrix

Whereas PageSpeed Insights can be used by anyone, GTmetrix is the one often used by web professionals. Once again, enter your web page and click on Test now or Analyse if you want to accept the default location, browser and connection speed.

It will still give you a rating and suggestions to speed up your website. To get the real technical data, you can just create a free account. This one is a bit more technical, but it is getting more important than ever.

What did you find?

It’s always been important for websites to be fast. Always.

What I find now is that some older websites are slowing down, even if they’ve been maintained. The website owners are being told that they need a new website, but that’s not necessarily true. It’s one of the reasons I created my new Website Health Check service.    

If you do the self-check and you realise that you don’t understand the results, or maybe you need a health check rather than a speed check, please contact me.