Last updated on January 17th, 2025 at 06:31 am
Entrepreneurs often don’t pay much attention to their website loading speed. And that’s a big mistake!
Your website loading speed can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Every second counts. Literally!
That’s why today we are going to discuss five simple ways to increase your website loading speed.
What is Website Loading Speed?
Website loading speed is a metric that shows how long it takes for a website to fully load. It is measured in seconds.
Meanwhile, page loading speed, which is also measured in seconds, is a separate but related metric that shows how long it takes for an individual page to load.
According to Backlinko’s research from 2019, the average page loading speed at the time was 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.4 seconds on mobile.
These numbers indicate that at the time businesses weren’t paying enough attention to page loading speed.
And this negligence was likely costing them thousands upon thousands of dollars in lost potential revenue.
We suspect that the situation hasn’t changed much since then. Page loading speed and website loading speed aren’t metrics that come to mind naturally when one thinks about building an online business. So it’s understandable that they often get overlooked.
If you haven’t given page speed and website loading speed much thought up until now, it’s likely that you could drastically improve them both by implementing the tips from this article.
Why Should You Care About Website Loading Speed?
The #1 reason why you should care about website loading speed is this:
Typically, the faster the page loads, the better it converts, which means that you can’t afford to have slow-loading pages in your sales funnel.
And website loading speed represents the average page loading speed of a given website!
Arguably, website loading speed and page loading speed are the two most commonly overlooked factors in conversion rate optimization, despite them having a huge impact on conversion rates.
According to Portent’s study where the company analyzed over 100 million page views across 20 B2B and B2C sites:
A site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds and 5x higher than a site that loads in 10 seconds.
This means that every additional second is almost certainly costing you money in lost potential revenue!
Moreover, Google’s research from 2017 established that page loading speed had a significant impact on bounce rates.
According to that study, going from 1 second to 3 seconds increased the probability of a bounce rate by 30%.
Meanwhile, going from 1 second to 10 seconds increased the probability of a bounce by 123%!
We can probably safely assume that this relationship between page loading speed and bounce rates may have become even stronger since then.
After all, the general trend that we see on the Internet is this: as people’s attention spans are decreasing, everything has to speed up to accommodate that.
So if people weren’t keen on sitting around waiting for a site to load back in 2017, they probably have even less patience now!
Finally, it’s well-known that Google is using site speed as one of its search algorithm ranking factors. They’ve been saying that since 2010!
In fact, we would argue that when it comes to technical SEO, website loading speed is the #1 thing that you should focus on. Why?
Because you can have great content and a bunch of backlinks, but if your website takes ages to load, Google might rank faster websites above yours.
So don’t let all that hard work you put into SEO go to waste just because your website isn’t optimized for speed!
How to Increase Website Loading Speed
Okay, so now you understand why website loading speed is so important, but what can you do to increase it?
Here are five things you can do that are likely to yield significant results:
Website Loading Speed Tip #1: Switch to Dedicated Hosting
There are two types of web hosting:
- Shared hosting where you share the server with other websites
- Dedicated hosting where you have the server all to yourself
Typically, when people decide to start an online business, they go with shared hosting as it’s the more affordable option.
However, that often turns out to be a penny-wise but pound-foolish decision.
Shared hosting tends to be slower because you have to share resources with other websites.
Given what we know about the relationship between conversion rates and page loading speed, lost potential revenue almost certainly exceeds the money saved on hosting fees.
Moreover, shared hosting usually also has lower uptime than dedicated hosting, so you can also expect to lose potential revenue due to your site being down more often.
Finally, web hosting companies tend to prioritize their dedicated hosting customers, so when your site goes down, which it inevitably will at some point, you’ll probably be able to get it back up faster if you are one.
That’s why we believe that paying for dedicated hosting is a worthwhile investment and recommend doing so if you are serious about growing your online business.
Website Loading Speed Tip #2: Choose the Right Software
Another factor that has a significant impact on your website loading speed is the software that you use as the foundation of your online business.
There are so many website builders, eCommerce platforms, and content management systems out there that it doesn’t make much sense to build a website from scratch anymore.
But it’s important to evaluate these software solutions not just in terms of functionality, user interface, and price, but also in terms of website speed.
Sometimes even solutions that look similar to one another at first glance can vary wildly in terms of website speed.
Say, if you want to build a blog, then WordPress and Ghost might seem similar because they are both blogging platforms.
However, despite its popularity, WordPress is known for being incredibly slow due to all the feature bloat that has accumulated over the years.
In fact, according to Ghost, independent tests have found Ghost to be up to 1,900% faster than WordPress. Crazy, right?
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should choose Ghost over WordPress, as both solutions have their pros and cons.
But you should definitely take website speed into account when making the final decision.
Website Loading Speed Tip #3: Reduce Image Sizes
Another factor that has a significant impact on size speed is image size.
This may not be immediately obvious as the individual image files tend to be pretty small. However, if you use images regularly, say, in every blog post, then they start adding up. And that can slow down your website.
You can avoid this by:
- Using JPEG format as the default – JPEG files have less data than PNG files and therefore tend to be smaller. So make sure to convert all your images to JPEG format. You can use ezgif.com for that.
- Minimize JPEG images – Once you have a JPEG file, use TinyJPG to reduce its size. Size savings will vary from image to image, but they will add up over time.
- Create a standard operating procedure (SOP) – Don’t just hope that you or whoever is responsible for creating content will remember to convert and minimize images every time. Converting images to the JPEG format + minimizing them with TinyJPG should be included in your content creation SOP checklist. Otherwise, it’s easy to forget and tempting to skip.
Also, if you already have an established website, we recommend going through your archives and replacing all images with minimized JPEG images.
That alone might be enough to speed up your website.
Website Loading Speed Tip #4: Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to Optimize Your Website
There are also various technical tweaks you can make in order to increase your website loading speed.
However, they tend to differ from website to website, so it’s best to use a diagnostic tool that allows you to analyze your website and identify opportunities for improvement.
There are quite a few solutions for this out there, but the most popular one is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Probably because it’s free!
All you need to do is type in your website’s address and click “Analyze”.
You’ll get separate analyses for mobile and desktop versions of your website that will show you:
- Core vitals assessment
- Diagnostic issues
- Suggestions for improvement
All that will be technical stuff, so if you aren’t a technical person yourself, you might want to hire a web developer to help you implement these suggestions.
Website Loading Speed Tip #5: Get ClickFunnels!
We believe that ClickFunnels is the best software for building an online business.
Our platform has everything you need to make money online:
- High-converting sales funnel templates
- A visual sales funnel builder
- A visual page builder
- An email marketing functionality
- An eCommerce functionality
- An online course builder
- A membership site builder
- A CRM functionality
…and much more!
And when it comes to website loading speed, we are fully aware of just how important it is.
That’s why we designed ClickFunnels with website loading speed in mind – pages created with our software load blazingly fast.
In fact, when we tested ClickFunnels against our major competitors, it blew all of them out of the water in this regard!
See for yourself:
ClickFunnels is a great option if you want to make sure that your website loads as fast as possible.
What’s best is that you won’t have to worry about all the technical details that affect your website loading speed – we have already optimized all that!