Site speed plays a crucial role in your website’s success. It affects a variety of key metrics, from visibility to conversion rate. Optimizing your website’s speed is clearly a necessity, but figuring out how to do it can be tricky. Fortunately, there are several easily-accessible speed tests you can use to determine how your site’s performance measures up. And although there are many reasons your site may be slow, you can resolve many of them with free WordPress plugins and quality web hosting. In this post, we’ll explore why site speed is so vital, and then dig into solutions that can help you optimize your website performance for speed. Let’s dive right in!
Why Your Website’s Loading Speed Matters
Things have changed a lot since the beginning of the internet. Today’s users expect significantly faster page load times, and your site needs to live up to their expectations. In fact, making sure your site is fast and performs well is the first of Google’s four Web Fundamentals, and it’s easy to see why.
How To Test Your Site’s Current Speed
Before we dive into some of the causes behind slow loading speeds, let’s look at how to examine your own site and see how well it’s currently performing. The best way to find out if your site is suffering from slowdowns is to test it thoroughly and regularly. Fortunately, there are free tools you can use to quickly gather this information.
We’re going to introduce a few free tools you can use to test your site’s speed. We recommend that you repeat these tests multiple times to ensure caching issues or high traffic don’t mess with your results. It’s also smart to run these tests regularly. New factors can affect your site and slow it down unexpectedly, so you’ll always need to keep up-to-date with its performance.
