WordPress Site Speed Matters

When a person lands on your site for the first time, you only have a few seconds to capture their attention to convince them to hang around. If your site takes too long to load, most people are gone, lost before you even had a chance. A slow site is not only a hassle for returning visitors, but will cause you to lose subscribers and paying customers.

WordPress Site Speed – Get ready to enjoy some big data research statistics:
#1 – Microsoft Bing search team: “A 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and a reduced clicks by 4.3%.”
#2 – Loadstorm and Aberdeen Group: “A single second increase in page load times leads to a 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.”
#3 – Amazon and Wal-Mart increased their net revenue with 1% for every 100ms speed improvement
#4 – Yahoo had a visitor increase of 9% for every 400ms speed improvement
#5 – Shopzilla increased their page loading from 6 to 1.2 seconds, which increased their page views with 25% and their revenue with 12%
#6 – Mozilla was able to get 60 million extra downloads a year by improving their page load with 2.2 seconds

WordPress owners also seem to forget that the quality of internet service is not uniform across the world. No help from a CDN and fast hosting, when you hit infrastructure issues. Your webpage may load in 2 seconds for you in Berlin, 3 seconds for your friend in Brussels, but it may only load in 6-7 seconds in Vienna. Now add a few more (3-5) seconds for smaller cities, a few seconds more (10-15) for countrysides and a bit more seconds (25-45) for remote places. So, how fast IS your website?

The website speed tests are done on the backbone of the global interlinked network, so that result is the best case scenario for your WordPress Site Speed. Real life testing is much much lower, the further you go from a big city and the further you are from your hosting.

How does WordPress Speed Up impact your visitors?
By lowering your website’s loading time by 0.5 seconds in Brussels, you may decrease it by 3 seconds in Vienna and reduce to half for countrysides and remote places. In addition to all the direct benefits, Google now includes site speed in it’s ranking algorithm. Google has been intentionally hazy on the specifics, but one thing’s for sure: better speed = higher ranking in Google’s eyes. A speedier website is usually the result of less processing, fewer requests, and fewer data.