I’m only 36 at the time of writing this but I remember clear as day, my parent’s old dial-up modem.
The weird, freaky sound it used to make. The fact that I nearly killed my Dads business by constantly hogging up the phone line whilst browsing some random crap. Poor guy, between me, being online and my sister constantly chatting to random friends of hers, it’s amazing anyone managed to get a hold of him to chat about his plumbing business.
Obviously, broadband came about which saved my Dad’s business and the ease at which I could get online, and download random things that were probably littered with viruses, grew exponentially.
At some point, I think we all assumed we’d get to a place where ‘that’s fast enough’ would take over and our download speeds would maintain at a healthy number for many, many years – I still recall seeing early broadband sales leaflets being dotted with the number of ‘high quality’ songs we’d be able to download in just a matter of hours… yes hours!
The thing is, we, as a society have gotten to a point now where we want basically, damn near instant gratification. I’m surprised we’re able to hold on waiting for a kettle to boil.
This desire for everything, yesterday has created a need for our business websites to be as quick as they possibly can be. The issue is if someone clicks our link… the cogs are whirring… nothing much is happening…
The default response is to just hit back and maybe, if we’re super, super lucky, try to load our site again but more often than not, it’s to go onto something else. Most website visits are from a mobile device now so we’re under constant load with distractions. Memes and our friend’s messages are ready and waiting for us.
Running Ads To A Slow Website
This issue is ten-fold when you start looking into running paid ads for your site. Be it Metas stack of Facebook & Instagram or Googles Pay Per Click platform, including YouTube and such, these people are going to give us even less time before they make a critical judgement in what they’re seeing.
I manage a lot of ad campaigns and one thing I see again and again is the number of people who’ve clicked to view our website vs the number of people that stayed. There is often a vast gap between the numbers.
So, What Can We Do About It?
Well, the obvious bit here is for me to pitch my services which I will.
Hire me. I’ll make things as quick as possible…
Done. OK. That was a bad pitch. It is a solution, however.
Personally, I’d avoid Squarespace. Every. Single. Time I work with one of their sites it is a guessing game as to which way things will go.
One of my favourite performance plugins for WordPress is PerfMatters.
https://perfmatters.io/
I include it as standard with any site I build. It’s just genius.
That alongside a good Cache plugin will also help a lot as well. Ultimately, we can’t always get crazy high scores right out of the box for every single website but as long as we know it’s doing the very best it can be, that’s enough!
If you want to check your current website out for speed;
https://gtmetrix.com/
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