Google is now all-in on mobile-first indexing. This means bloggers and developers need to be all in on mobile-first planning.
You can painstakingly chart out a perfect mobile experience for your users, complete with simple navigation and lean design. However, a slow mobile site can undo all of this.
You know that your site has to be fast, but you may not be aware of what is slowing you down. Here are 3 of the most common culprits.
1. Bad Hosting
The first thing you need to look at is your host. Not all hosts are created equal and cheap hosting leads to slow and unreliable performance. Don’t cheap out, you can find an affordable Wordpress hosting plan for your Wordpress website to ensure your speeds are always optimal.
Free or cheap hosting is notorious for spotty (at best) performance. They have also been known to cap your bandwidth and slow your site down if your site starts to use up too much of their limited resources. Simply put, they will slow you down on purpose as soon as you start to build momentum and see good traffic.
Go with a hosting company that actually has the resources to help you succeed.
2. Only Worrying About Speed Once Per Year
Most companies will audit their speeds once a year, see good results and assume they’re fine for the next 12 months. However, over the next 12 months, they add several blogs, images, videos, and Wordpress plugins in the back end that slow them down.
To ensure your site is running as quickly as possible all yearlong you need to:
- Ensure all of your images are compressed and optimized
- Prune your content regularly
- Delete any plugins you’re not using
This is not a once-a-year task. This is an all-year-round task.
3. Only Testing the Home Page
Also, most companies will run a speed test on their home page, while completely ignoring the rest of the site. They see a good speed on the home page and move on with a false sense of security. Meanwhile, their most important pages are running far slower than the home page.
You need to run speed tests site-wide. Particularly on your most important blogs and landing pages. You can earn people’s interest with a beautiful and fast home page, but lose them after the first click because the next page takes too long to load.
Also, it’s important to remember that only about half of your visitors will arrive at your home page. Many will arrive from the Google SERPs, Pay-per-click ads or social media. You need to make sure those pages load quickly so you’re not wasting the initial click.
Most of the country is now covered in 4G mobile coverage, with 5G poised to roll out even further in 2020. As our networks and devices get faster, the average user is going to grow less patient and less likely to wait for a slow web page to load.
Make sure you’re setting your site up to succeed by choosing a reliable web hosting company, while ensuring you’re testing all of your internal pages (not just the home page), while doing so on a regular basis.
Failing to do any of these 3 things is essentially dooming your site to perform slowly, while pretty much daring your visitors to go somewhere else.
