Any business’s goal is growth and profit, and reaching it is supposed to be done top-notch and extremely professionally. Many steps need to be taken, and there are a lot of factors that will determine a website’s success.
What is crucial today for a valuable online presence is UX/UI design. The top priority is the UX part, whose role is to improve the user experience and satisfaction, which ultimately attracts and retains the number of visitors.
An integral part of good UX design is a website’s speed. The site’s speed shows how quickly the user can see the content they are going to interact with.
Let’s compare it to a restaurant. When a guest orders food, the time he spends waiting for his meal will affect his experience of the restaurant.
When talking about a website’s loading speed, the ideal speed is 1 to 2 seconds. According to research, if the loading time is:
- 1-3 sec, the probability of abandonment increases by 32%
- 1-5 sec, the probability of abandonment increases to 90%
- 1-6 sec, the probability of abandonment climbs to 106%
- 1-10 sec, the probability of abandonment increases by 123%
User retention is crucial for conversions, and slow websites can easily lose visitors.
Three key things related to a site’s speed:
- Conversion rate – the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors
- Loyalty – a customer returns to your website over and over
- Search ranking on Google – the fastest websites rank significantly higher
Table of Contents
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of users whose visit is followed by the desired action, and as such, it is essential for the website’s success. There are several types of conversions, but they are all based on measuring what actually happens when there is a visitor.
An example of the rate could be an eCommerce website that recorded 100,000 visits in one month and only 2,000 purchases made. The conversion rate of that site would be 2%.
According to research, 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load. This is when users abandon the site, and the conversion rate is significantly lowered.
Loyalty
Loyalty refers to repeated cooperation with people who have already been your clients or customers. If users visit your site only once, you are at a loss rather than at a profit. You don’t get any value from such visitors, especially not in the long run.
What builds your brand and increases your profit are regular customers who make up a loyal group of your visitors. That is ideal for any business type because those customers are already introduced to your brand and know what to expect.
Some surveys say that 79% of customers will not repeat purchases in an online store if they were dissatisfied with the site’s speed. 64% of them make their purchase on a different online store.
Search ranking on Google
Statistics show that 75% of people will never go to the second or third Google page, which shows that your website shouldn’t be there. A large amount of information circulating on the Internet must be sorted to be found.
Ranking systems offer users the most relevant results in the shortest period of time and are made up of a series of algorithms. Google algorithm takes website speed into account as one of the metrics used to rank the websites.
Sites with faster loading time automatically get a chance to reach their target sooner, which is everyone’s ultimate goal of the Google “race”, isn’t it?
Best WordPress plugins for speeding up a site
In a time of great competition in all fields, it makes a difference knowing how to build your online presence in the best possible way. Keep up with the times by constantly improving the site using all available opportunities.
After introducing the importance of a fast website, you’ll want to get started on making improvements right away.
In some ways, this will take some time and effort. For instance, website speed also depends on your hosting provider. If your website is very slow, you might have to switch providers.
However, there are some concrete solutions that can help you raise everything to a higher level almost instantly– plugins.
Using plugins will help speed up the site and increase the quality.
1. Hummingbird
Hummingbird is a great plugin that can help you with a variety of tasks. It compresses your text and efficiently utilizes your cache memory. In addition, it reduces CSS and JavaScript as well as improves JavaScript code execution.
The numbers associated with this plugin are amazing. The plugin has more than 100.000 active installations. 88.9% of users who left a review on the WordPress official site gave it the maximum rating.
Hummingbird works by scanning your website and offering solutions to make it faster. You are just a few clicks away from a speedy website.
With the proper use of this plugin, you will get an overall better and faster site, and it will be ranked higher on Google. Moreover, you will have better PageSpeed Insights results and happier visitors.
2. WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is a plugin used for improving a website’s speed and has over a million active installations.
The three main aspects this plugin focuses on when increasing your website’s speed:
- Database cleaning and optimization
- Image compression
- Page caching
Tests have shown that WP-Optimize gives similar results as other plugins when it comes to caching. However, what sets it apart and makes it better is image compression and optimizing and cleaning up the database.
It’s important to emphasize the possibility of CSS and JavaScript minifying, which is another benefit of this plugin.
WP-Optimize also has a premium version available, which is even more powerful and richer in features, from deleting unused and unwanted images to premium support.
3. Jetpack
Jetpack has a bigger range of features, from security and backups to those that improve a website’s speed and growth. Also, its numbers speak for themselves – over 5 million active installations.
Let’s focus on speed and performance. Together with Google AMP, Jetpack enables the development of beautiful, modern, and fast websites without coding.
This plugin uses so-called lazy loading to load images, resulting in a super-fast experience even on mobile devices. Jetpack delays loading images and other media until the user scrolls to the part of the page where they are displayed.
What sets it apart from other plugins is the search feature designed and optimized to help users quickly get to what they are looking for.
Conclusion
Website’s speed is one of the most important factors of its growth and success. The goal is for visitors to spend more time on the site without waiting too much for the page to load.
In today’s fast-paced times, no one wants to waste their precious moments spending time on slow sites. Take the opportunity to speed up your site, improve your business and stand out in the crowd.
The plugins mentioned in this article will help you check all of the boxes and bring your website to the top of the rank.
