Website Speed & Performance

Don’t Make Visitors Wait Around to View Your Website

Ensure that your site is fast and fully functional with a website optimization audit.

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What Is a Website Optimization Audit?

A website optimization audit is an analysis of your website’s speed and performance. Website audits take a look at important site speed metrics, such as:

• Time to start rendering: The time it takes for content to begin appearing in the browser
• Total loading time: The time it takes for the whole website page to display
• Time to interact: How long the user must wait until interactive elements become visible and functional
• Time to first byte (TTFB): How long it takes for a response to arrive after a request is sent

If any of these times are longer than they should be, the audit should include suggestions for how to improve them — often by updating old and inefficient code, optimizing images and videos, leveraging browser caching, and other tactics.

Why Is Website Speed Important?

A fast-loading website is essential to conversions because most users have short attention spans when browsing online. According to a case study published on HubSpot, a one-second delay could bring a reduction of as much as 7% in conversions.

If your initial page content doesn’t load within a couple of seconds, you’ll likely lose some visitors before they even see your site. For example, for every additional second in page load time, BBC found that it lost 10% of their total users.

Additionally, Google’s algorithm takes site and page speed into account when ranking pages, meaning that slower load times could result in a worse ranking for your website (and thus fewer visitors to it). Another consequence of slow load times is that search engines can crawl fewer pages in the time they’re allocated, which could negatively impact your indexation as well.

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Our Website Performance Audit Process

1. Check your current hosting plan. If your website is hosted on an outdated platform, the first step is to move your website to a hosting service that is optimized for site performance. We have a monthly Hosting & Maintenance plan you can take advantage of if you choose to host with us, and we will take care of the site transfer as part of the Performance Optimization Audit service.
2. Review your site performance. Site speed varies significantly from moment to moment based on a variety of factors. To accomodate for these variations, we run multiple tests across various platforms and at different times of the day. Finally, we calculate some average metrics and generate a list of consistent performance issues.
3. Optimize. Once the audit is complete, we perform a base optimization that involves many best practice tasks that can be put into place on most WordPress websites, regardless of the individual site structure. These include tasks such as minifying and combining scripts and stylesheets, cleaning out unnecessary plugins, fully updating the site, and more.
4. Test again. After our initial optimization tasks are complete, we run another set of tests to determine which performance issues have improved and which still need to be addressed.

Any remaining issues tend to be unique to specific site builds and require additional work to fix. We’ll provide you with a list of these issues, which we can tackle as part of a custom quote or as part of your development retainer, if you choose to sign up for one.