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Businesses that depend on their websites for lead capturing and sales conversions stand to lose significant revenue when their website goes down or loads too slowly. You probably designed your website with conversion rates in mind, but page speed might not have been one of your top concerns.

Think about it. If you have the choice of purchasing a baby gift from three different sites, you'll go to your favorite first. If it's taking time to load, you'll bounce over to the competitor's site within seconds. You're short on time and must complete the task before jumping on a business call in five minutes. Completing the purchase is more important than waiting around for your favorite store to load up.

Nearly 70% of users say that the speed of a page affects their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Unbounce conducted their own study and discovered that 22% of your website visitors will close your tab if your site takes too long to load. Another 14% say they'll visit a competitor's site instead. If you count on 1000 daily visitors, that's 360 potential customers lost.

Try this formula out for yourself. How many visitors do you expect on your site per day? Multiply that number by .36 to determine how many visitors are potentially lost due to a slow webpage. (You can connect your website to google analytics to obtain real numbers regarding your website traffic.)

Still not convinced? Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5).

How do I measure my page speed?

Before panicking, first, determine your page speed by measuring it.

There are many tools available including:

Solarwind's Pingdom

Google Pagespeed

These tools not only measure your page speed but also capture many other metrics as well to help you improve your end-user experience.

3 Reasons why your website is down or slow

There are many reasons why your website may be sluggish or completely down, and more often than not, the solutions are straightforward. Read about more ways to speed up your website here, and try these 3 tips below.

Your website hosting service

Not all web hosts are created equal, which is why Witty Sparks produced this guide on how to compare different options and choose the right one for your needs. According to WebsiteSetup, although most web hosting services promise 99.99% uptime, the average uptime of 32 shared web hosting providers was actually 99.59%. When calculated, that amounts to about 35 hours 32 minutes of downtime per year, per website!

WebsiteSetup recommends web hosts that provide you with an uptime of at least 99.94%.

There are other points to consider when choosing a web hosting provider. Does your web hosting provider offer the following?

1. A CDN: If your business is global, a CDN (content delivery network) enables you to distribute your content from servers located around the world. For example, if your web host's main server is located in New York, and your user is located in India, a CDN will replicate your site and place it on a server in India (and other global locations) so that users in India can access it more quickly.

2. Managed services as opposed to shared services

There are different ways to be hosted. For small businesses that run few campaigns or host less daily traffic, sharing server space with other sites will probably be fine.

For larger businesses with more traffic, campaigns, and frequent spikes in traffic, you may be asking, do you need managed WordPress hosting? This is an option with a dedicated server or a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that will give you more flexibility and space for additional traffic. What is managed WordPress hosting, you ask.

2) Your website content

A website with all the bells and whistles may be attention-grabbing and aesthetically pleasing, but fancy websites tend to load more slowly.

Backlinko's research revealed that the total content size impacts fully loaded page speed more than any other variable on both desktop and mobile.

Too many images, videos, and third-party scripts (like Google Analytics, video hosts, etc.) weigh down a site. As a result, large pages (greater than 3.49 MB) take 486% longer to fully load compared to smaller pages (less than .83 MB).

Perhaps that's one reason why many modern websites have opted for a minimalist design with fewer images and assets.

Have your website developer audit your site. Depending on the results, you can then reduce the weight of your website content by:

1. Optimizing and compressing your images and videos
2. Limiting the number of plugins
3. Reducing the number of JavaScript and CSS files
4. Installing website caching

There are also specific plugins that can help you with all these tasks, like WP Rocket, as recommended here. It includes lazy loading, caching, CDN configuration, and a few other tools that speed up your site.

3) Your end user's device and network

Your end-user may experience a slow load time because he's working from an outdated device or is located in an area with poor internet service. Even if your site is perfectly optimized, there's nothing you can do about the end-user. On a positive note, your competition won't fare any better in this scenario.

Your customer's expectations matter

The first step in any sales process is prospecting or lead generation. If you're running an online business, part of that process occurs through your website. Your prospect explores your site, your product, your blog, and all the assets provided to determine if you offer what they need.

For your potential customers, this research occurs early in their buyer's journey. If you want them to see your value proposition at its best and convert them into real leads, your website needs to be user-friendly. It's not just about having a cool design and top visuals; your site speed is probably the most important factor contributing to your site's UX, although there may also be other design mistakes affecting user experience.

Don't risk losing potentially solid leads and lost revenue because of a slow website. Test your page speed as well as your site speed, and then, fix your site accordingly.

Also, with mobile searches on the rise, your prospects expect their mobile load speed to match their desktop speed. Keep this in mind as you optimize your site.

Then, sit back and watch your leads click and convert.

As managed WordPress hosting experts, we know what we're talking about, whether you need advice on what's making your site slow, how to secure it, or how much bandwidth you really need. You can trust us with the entire gamut of WordPress questions, so the only one left is... why aren't we hosting your WordPress site yet? Click below and join us.

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The post How Much Do You Lose in Sales When Your Website is Down - or Even Just Slow? appeared first on uPress.

But WordPress sites can be notoriously heavy and slow to load, thanks to all the plugins, themes, unnecessary CSS, etc. 

It’s easier to track down the fault when the entire website is slow, but it’s fairly common to see a really slow page load the first time you hit the website in the morning, or if the site’s been unused for a few hours and then you return to it. 

After it’s "woken up" the first time, it's generally smooth and fast loading for the rest of the day. Since it's pretty unlikely that your website is just not a morning person, there’s got to be another way to fix a WordPress site that's slow to load the first page.

To fulfill your need for speed - click here

How to deal with your WordPress site when it's slow to load first page

There's no single solution that works for every web page. Fixing website speed and page load requires a lot of time, attention, and tedious trial and error, although there are some common fixes to try out first before you reach out to your community forum. 

Use your local server's IP and turn to https://gtmetrix.com to run a site audit and work through the issues that it presents. Some of the factors that influence page speed and load, and which could be causing your issue, include:

• Image optimization
• Too many CSS files, and/or CSS files that are going unused
• Too many JavaScript files
• Not deferring JavaScript parsing
• Failing to minimize JavaScript
• Failing to minimize CSS
• Too many MySql queries
• Failing to minimize request size
• Forgetting to leverage browser caching

Here are some of the ways that WordPress developers have dealt with their slow initial page load problem. 

1. Check your server

If you're lucky, it's a server issue caused by your host's policies. Shared hosting is particularly prone to slowing down your page load and speed, but it can happen even with dedicated hosts.

Some hosts do throttle speeds for inactive pages, and there have been a lot of complaints around GoDaddy's host loading speeds. Try transferring your page to a local managed WordPress hosting service so you can identify if the problem persists.

2. Examine your caching 

If you're loading RSS feeds front-end, the cache can expire, which causes a very long pause before there’s a response the next time you load up the site. Installing a caching plugin can help.

If you've already got a lot of caching in your cPanel, that could be interfering with response time. Deactivate and reactivate your caching plugins one at a time to see what helps, and try rejigging your caching plugin setup. Sometimes it helps to remove "Combine CSS Files" and "Combine JavaScript Files".

If you've identified the cache plugin, but you can't do without it, experiment with the plugin settings. ESI has been found to be a problem for LS Cache plugin users, it treats each image as a separate block and makes a separate PHP request, so that's a lot of requests and the images load very slowly

3. Reinstall all plugins

Even though your plugin is active, updated, and seems to be working smoothly, sometimes you end up with a patchwork of updates and code that drags everything down. It can work to remove and then reinstall each of your plugins, one at a time. Reinstalling means you get the latest version all in one smooth package.

4. Clean up heavy elements

Over time, large databases can bloat and get clogged up. If you’ve been running the same website for years, all your different plugins, restyling, and updates can leave their traces on database tables. Use query monitor to determine if this is a problem — log in as admin with query monitor active, leave the site for a day, then return to check which queries take the longest.

Sometimes 'Advanced Database Cleaner' can help, but if your databases are large, your only option will be to completely reset them and rebuild them from scratch.

5. Rewrite your php

WordPress' PHP itself can be holding you back. Try rebuilding your site with your own PHP codes. It might take more effort than using WordPress PHP, but the results will be worth it.

6. Cron job workaround

It's not a solution, but if you’ve been trying and trying and you still can’t find the root of the issue, setting up a cron task or scheduled task can serve as a workaround. Create a cron job to call your home page once every 5, 10, or 20 minutes, to keep it "awake" so that you won’t have the issue of WordPress being slow to load the first page.

7. Think differently

One developer couldn't work out what was dragging down his site page load and speed. His team tried literally everything, and nothing worked. They came back to it after four years (!) and discovered that the sites had too many articles marked as sticky.

Because of the WordPress serialized array in wp_options to mark sticky posts, it caused the main loop of the dynamic home page to take an incredibly long time. Clearing the sticky_posts field in the table fixed the problem.

Deal with WordPress when it's slow to load first page

Fixing your WordPress website speed really isn't optional. It’s almost certainly going to take you a lot of time and effort, trying one thing and then another, but it'll be worth it when you solve the issue. These fixes mentioned above are a good place to start.

As managed WordPress hosting experts, we speak your language. We can geek out with you about site audits, but we can also discuss cron tasks, IPv6 support, or DNS tools. You can trust us with the entire gamut of WordPress questions, so the only one left is... why aren't we hosting your WordPress site yet? Click below and join us.

To fulfill your need for speed - click here

The post How to Fix a Slow First Page Load on a WordPress Site appeared first on uPress.