07 Nov Common Website Mistakes #5 – Slow Website Hosting
There are many common mistakes made by small business owners online; #5 is slow hosting. And this one doesn’t always relate to cheap either.
Hi there, folks. My name is Paul Barrs, welcome. Thank you for taking time to watch this video, continuing on my series on simple mistakes you can easily avoid when it comes to the management of the website side of your business.
And this one is an absolute cracker, and I have to say, takes quite a bit of time and effort to get right.
Don’t give your visitors a slow load time experience. This is where it comes down to the technical. It’s a matter of getting that website to load as quickly as possible. While it’s a simple mistake easy to avoid, it takes some effort to do, and I’ve written, and I’ve recorded, I should say, other videos on this topic in more depth and more detail.
But a good question is, how long should it take for a website to load? And well obviously, that time, that speed depends on your consumer, your visitor’s browser. It depends on their location. It depends on their internet speed. Those things are outside of your control.
But there are many things that are inside of your control that you must address, and here’s why I list this as a mistake, because I know most business owners don’t even test. They don’t even know. They’re not even aware that they have a problem in this area. Just because you, yourself may not be capable of fixing it, doesn’t mean you cannot at least check it out, be aware of it and know it needs to be fixed.
Just Google “page speed load time” There are many tools including one or two by Google themselves who will give you hints and tips. And you probably won’t be able to do these things yourself. You need a professional to do it for you, that’s fine. But how long should it take? Twenty seconds, 15 seconds, 10 seconds? Google’s measurement is three seconds or less. Oh boy, that’s a big ask.
Hey, even with my website, I’ve only been able to at its best get it down to around four seconds, and that is because of the CMS that I am using and the particular theme. Not so much the CMS, but the theme that I am using. And when I chose that theme, I did it intentionally because of its other qualities, knowing that I would sacrifice just a little bit when it came to load time.
We are still implementing one more action which will take that and shave that extra second, second and a half away. But this is something you need to be looking at in your own website. Why is it a simple mistake? Why is it easy to avoid? Because most people don’t.
Okay folks, that’s it for this video. I want you to if you haven’t already, go and check your page load speed, not just for your homepage, but all your main entry pages into your website. Use your analytics and look at the landing pages report. Look and see which pages people are arriving first time on your website and then check out their page load speed. And then talk to your web developer to get those things fixed. It’s essential and it’s easy to do.
All right, my name is Paul Barrs, from paulbarrs.com, signing off. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
