Does website speed matter?

The speed at which your site loads used to be really important for one simple reason: visitors would leave if your site took too long to load.

When websites ruled!

When we first started designing sites in 1996, there were no social media properties and there was no Google. Yahoo, AOLSearch, and Infoseek ruled the search landscape. Your site was the only online extension of your brand so it got all your focus.

Social Media Shift.

With the advent of social media came many new ways to extend your brand into very specific demographics. Then the big push to make everything an app demanded examination. Then the move to smartphones had to be addressed. We came through the other side of these shifts with the idea that we had to define and manage a customized media mix for each of our clients.

Why websites still matter.

For most businesses, a fundamentally well-made website is still the cornerstone for the media mix, even if it does not get the majority of the focus. That’s the problem we see with many small businesses now. With all that focus and time spent posting to social media, many sites have become stale. This creates a situation where one component of the media mix, the website, is out of step with everything else.

What to do about your website design and function.

Step one in addressing this situation is to pour through every detail of your site and make sure the basic content is current. Step two is to find ways to speed the actual function of your site. With WordPress, there are many choices available to do this. Some are poorly supported, and don’t work well. Some are absolutely fantastic. Work with a WordPress expert to make your site lean and mean for the fastest possible download.

Still the biggest reason to enhance your site speed.

The biggest reason to enhance your site speed is still simply to keep your site visitors from leaving. We’ve gotten spoiled with faster and faster internet speeds so most of us won’t wait longer than 2 or 3 seconds for a site to load.

Why you can’t ignore your site speed.

The second biggest reason is that Google figures your site speed into your search positions. So if you’ve got a well-branded site with good messaging and a business model that deserves to be on top of the search results, but your site loads slowly, you will be invisible.

Site speed has been important for quite a while, but not addressing it now could be devastating to a small business.