Today I want to answer a question that we get probably every week, and it’s either “why is my website not running very fast?” Or “why is my website so slow?” Or the question will be, “does it matter how fast my website is?”, “Is that a big deal? Or is that just you SEO guys trying to convince me to hire you and give you money to make my site faster?” And the truth is that speed is a big deal.
If you stop to think about it, you know this is true because you’re as impatient as I am and as everyone else is and Google knows that we’re all impatient, and if we pull up a website on our phone and it doesn’t load under like a second, we’re thinking oh that website must not work. Do we not have any signal? If we have a signal, and it’s still not loading. Then we’re thinking, okay well I’m going somewhere else. I’ll just look at another website and we do another search and so Google knows this, that’s a bounce to them.
Google wants to make sure that your website is loading in a second or less and that’s a big deal because if your websites taking 6, 7, or 8 seconds before anything is showing up if you’ve got some big pictures or some video on there then that’s going to hurt you. That’s going to ding you.
It’s one of those things that can mess up all your SEO efforts no matter how hard you’re working at it or how good your SEO guy is. If your website is taking forever to load, then that can undo a lot of that work.
It’s important that you’ve got good hosting for your website and that it is running fast. There are some things that you can do. What do you do to fix it? First, you want to go test the speed and you can go to a website called GTmetrix.com, and you can run a speed test there or you can just go to Google, they have developer tools (PageSpeed Insights), and you can run a site speed test there and they’ll tell you what they think could be wrong with it, but they won’t tell you how to fix it other than they’ll say, hey, you need to compress your images and make your images smaller. Which is something you can probably do if you have tinkered around with your website yourself.
Then there are some other things like cleaning up your HTML, and all these things in the background that you’d kind of have to know your way around the website to do those things and you may need some help with that. So, the answer is, yeah, your website needs to be fast.
If you care about showing up on Google, you want to, get the speed test done and then do whatever you can to score as high as you possibly can on the Google speed test so that they’re not afraid to show your website to people when people are searching.
