Is website speed important for my visitors?

A lot of people are working hard, very hard in fact to promote their website by posting comments, replying on forums, or maybe guest posting on other website blogs, but they don’t know something really really important. I realized a few weeks ago when I fixed my cache plugin for my website. I normally had less visitors then I have right now, and also I get almost every visitor from Google search engine. This is cool right? Well not at the time, while I have been doing my best in writing proper content then, my website load time was really high, about 2 seconds to 5 seconds or more per each page view. So I was thinking is website speed important for my visitors or I’m good the way I am ? It is documented that a visitor that stays between 3 to 5 seconds or more on a website will either get annoyed or just leave directly without waiting for page to finish loading.

Investigating the cause why the website was slow!

Since I have had at the time a bit more free time (finally!), I thought of checking the cause of this, I was pretty sure that at the time my optimization on wordpress was good, eg. installing a cache plugin, making sure to reduce overall resource downloaded and so on. I ended up testing two servers :), I had a wordpress installation where it was working just fine, so wanted to test servers to see if it was a server configuration or the script was having some glitches …

Read here for wordpress optimization.

To my (good) surprise, it was not working properly on the new server, so the issue was definitely something with the script. I want to warn everyone, DO NOT install wp-super-cache and w3-total-cache while testing which one are better. I can say for sure, both have their perks and both offer almost the same performances. I personally use the first one due to its preload option which lets me create a cached pages of each of my articles before these being accessed by a user and cached pages being created.

So in my case, the issue was due to my cache plugin which I have said in my older articles that it wasn’t generating cache pages and on each request it was trying to create the cache but couldn’t, hence the delay. Conclusion is, you need to carefully investigate the cause of why this is happening and why your website is slow. There are online website testing tools that you can use for this also, so do rely on them to fix locate the cause, they are really helpful and really informative!

How did this helped me with my website?

Well Google is really really picky with us when ranking us in their search results, it seems the lower the page load time, the better you are being ranked, and this is also visible in Webmaster tools at the crawler stats. Let me show you just how it looks:

Google crawler time downloading a page

As you can see, the time went quite down there. I may be wrong when saying that Google will also keep this in mind, SEO specialists can confirm this better them me, but I did noticed a double increase in visitors from Google searches after fixing my website speed.

And also it is also a matter preference of having a slow website compared to having a fast website (if you are like me, you will most likely like a fast website …). Your visitors will like it, you will be happy that your visitors are happy, and most likely they will like to visit your website much more then compared to waiting each page to load!

That’s it for today, don’t forget to share, comment and bookmark, until next time!