Dear WordPress Aficionado,
“Speed! Speed! Speeeeed!” – were crying the zombies. They were stocked up with brains for years and now just wanted to eat it as fast as possible.”
This is a line from my future book that tells the story of a market researcher living in a post-apocalyptic society. It’s a work of fiction, but any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.
I’m joking, of course…
In the next few days, I will publish several articles on the ins and outs of making your WordPress site fast and furious. It will be a mix of philosophy, and practical stuff, so don’t miss it.
But before we go deep into the technical stuff, let’s be clear about that:
It’s a matter of money and business success
We won’t talk about “page loading speed” as something isolated. Something meaningless outside the world of the nerdy technical guys who like everything to be flawless.
No, no! I’m even advocating against the strive for perfection when we optimize for the search engines, but that’s another topic we’ll discuss later.
Your very business depends on your website’s performance because opening a page is like visiting a restaurant. When a customer sits down to eat, slow service from the waiter often leads to a bad review in Yelp and fewer customers in the future. Similarly, slow site speed can lead to fewer conversions, i.e. fewer sign-ups or sales.
The other way around is true, too: less loading time can mean more conversion.
For example:
- When retailer AutoAnything reduced page load time by half, they saw an increase of 12% to 13% in sales.
- When Pinterest reduced perceived wait times by 40%, they witnessed an increased search engine traffic and sign-ups by 15%;
- And the BBC found they lost as much as an additional 10% of users for every extra second their site took to load.
I bet you can quickly calculate the monetary side of 12% more sales or 15% more sign-ups…
Of course, don’t take those numbers for granted. Nobody can promise you specific results.
The important thing is that the mentioned case studies aren’t exceptions. If you offer decent products or services and start getting more traffic because your pages load faster, then there is a high possibility your sales numbers will get better.
That’s not theory…
The biggest search engine Google included page speed as one of its ranking factors way back in 2010.
In 2017 they made it even more important when they introduced their mobile-first indexing. And more recently, the search engine expanded the meaning of “loading speed” by integrating the so-called “Core Web Vitals” to its ranking algorithm.
So if your website loads faster, it will have better chances to receive more visitors.
That’s why it’s not surprising that everybody advocates for better loading times. And in most cases, it’s something you set it and forget it.
Anyway, next time I will show you the “Four Horsemen Of Apocalypse” (if I must stick to the theme) who define what’s slow and what’s fast.
Cheers,
Sashe Vuchkov
The Code & Marketing Combinator
P.S. Yesterday, I announced some bad stuff about my SEO app. Now I will announce some good stuff…
I fixed the speed issue, and BuhalBu’s Kit is comparable with the alternatives.
Moreover, I came up with a strategy that shortens the crawling time by a third so my app can be faster than the competition in some instances.
