The Real Reason You Need Your WordPress Websites to Load Quickly | EP 784

The Real Reason You Need Your WordPress Websites to Load Quickly

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler: Hey everyone welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, i’m Tim Strifler and today we’re talking about the real reason you need your WordPress websites to load quickly. So talking about speed performance website optimization um whatever you want to call it. Now a lot of times when people talk about this they talk about search engines, right? And search engines are now using speed as a ranking factor and people use that as a way to like convince you to make your website load fast, and while that’s true to a degree, really the main reason that you want your website to load quickly is for users. Right, you you want your customers or potential customers to have a good experience on your site and there’s nothing more frustrating than landing on a website trying to figure out something be like wait did my internet go out what’s happening, and then you go to another site and that loads quickly, and then you’re like no it’s just a site. And then you give another second you’re like you know what i’m over it so that’s not the experience you want to give to your customers or potential customers. So it’s not that difficult to make your websites load quickly. Once you know the optimization steps which we’ll talk about in in future episodes um but one thing too that a lot of people don’t understand is speed is not linear, and what i mean by that is if it takes maybe one two seconds three seconds to load for you and you’re like that’s not too bad it’s not great but it’s not terrible. Well a lot of times when you’re you’re seeing that you’re on a fast connection right now if you take that same load speed and put it on a slower connection maybe a mobile device maybe someone that’s in an area of the country of the world that doesn’t have really fast internet. Now that slowness that you saw that wasn’t that bad is now just infinitely worse on a slower connection and so, so speed website speed is not linear it’s not going to load the same amount of time for all users. So the slower it is for a fast connection it’s going to be infinitely slower on a slow connection and so that’s why it’s so important, because people don’t want to wait around for something. Right, we live in a society where we we have everything at our fingertips everything’s about convenience, and so um yeah you want to make sure that you are building websites that load quickly not just for search engines but primarily for the user. And so um and one of those things to look at too is how it loads in a real browser everyone’s obsessed with speed testing tools which can be helpful for benchmarking and for finding bottlenecks and stuff like that but uh that should not be your end-all be-all. Right, speed testing scores are not perfect. Right, look at sites like amazon like they score horrendously but if you actually load in a browser it’s very fast so you want it to feel fast in your browser in an uncached browser it’s an incognito window that sort of thing. So that’s it for this episode, tomorrow we are talking about managing clients and building client websites. So the title of the episode is do this for your clients if you want to be successful. So until then take care bye-bye.