Once you developed the traffic and jumped up to some of the top rankings in a search engine, you might begin to notice other problems. The most common issue that people have when they see a lot of traffic without a reasonable amount of business is that people aren’t staying on their site.
The top reason that people leave a website is that the page is too slow. Use these simple tips to speed up your site and keep your visitors on your page longer.
Keep It Simple
The internet is full of websites overcomplicating website maintenance. There are a few additions to any website that will slow it down for any visitor. Unfortunately, when you’re new to running a website, they’re also the most fun thing to work with.
Get rid of, or at least only use sparingly, these items:
· Social media feeds
· Widgets
· Event calendars
· Videos
Although you want to keep some of these to help promote your business or where you’ll be in the next few weeks, so your readers can keep up, you don’t need every widget available in WordPress or your host of choice.
The bottom line here is that overloading your page with junk will make load times unreasonable and lead to people leaving your site.
Understanding Bounce Rate
This term is often used to confuse or otherwise bamboozle new website owners. You may have received many emails after launching your site with claims that an independent website designer could fix a variety of technical terms, bounce rate included.
But, there’s nothing special about bounce rate, in fact, it’s so easy you can fix this yourself. Bounce rate comes from Google Analytics, and it gives a percentage that represents the value of your page to the visitors.
It does this by evaluating the number of visitors to the number of pages visited. Google wants to know if your visitors stick around for valuable information.
Many people believe that the speed affects the bounce rate, but these aspects work together. High bounce rates are the big red flag that your page is too slow. It can also lead you to some easy solutions such as these:
· Making a website search function available
· Ensuring your content is relevant
· Removing pop-ads
Plugins
Although plugins don’t fix everything, they do provide a competitive advantage. Many website owners know that their page is slow but can’t diagnose the problem themselves. You don’t need an expensive IT consultant. What you need is a tool that will give you the information so that you can make decisions about your site.
Google Page Speed Insights lets you know what is slowing down each page, not just the website as a whole. It provides important data through various reports, so you can adjust your site to improve your speed regularly.
Insights might include reevaluating your search engine optimization, eliminating unnecessary JavaScript, and optimizing images.
