Why Website Loading Speed Is More Important Than Ever

The speed in which your attorney website loads is crucial in creating a positive experience for the visitor. Additionally, a website’s loading speed is also factored into your Google ranking, which is necessary when growing your audience.

If a website fails to load completely within a few seconds, the user will become frustrated, move on to the next site and will most likely never return. When designing websites for clients, my goal is to have the website load in less than 2 seconds. You also risk visitors telling others that they failed to have a good experience on your site and may recommend another alternative. A slow website will not only lose a current visitor but potential future visitors, as well, causing a decrease in conversion rates.

Some of the tips below may require some technical assistance.

Below are 6 Tips you can use to help speed up your website:

 

Decrease Image Size

Adding large images to your website will dramatically slow down the loading speed. Even though the picture on the page may be small, if the source picture is super large, the server will still have to call on that large image. Thus, making the website slower.

Images should be resized to properly fit the width of the web page. If you only need an image that is 300px wide don’t upload an image that is 1200px wide. They also load much faster if they are in JPEG format.

Compressing the resized images will also help them load more quickly. One of the quickest and easiest ways to resize a large image is to use one of the many free websites that will let you resize and compress the image. These websites can optimize your image without losing their quality. I highly recommend optimizing your images before placing them on your site. It’s an extra step, but your websites will load much faster.

Here are some suggested sites

– http://www.reduceimages.com/

– https://tinypng.com/ (They even offer a WordPress plugin so if you upload an image it optimizes it automatically.)

 

 

Optimize Code

Take a good look at the code on your site. If you notice any extra spaces, commas or special characters, then removing them will aid in speeding up your page.

Any unused code should also be removed, as well as formatting and code comments.

Here is a great article with some tips on optimizing and speeding up your WordPress website.

 

Minimize Redirects

When a web page is redirected, load times are increased and the user may become impatient and click away to another site.

 

Minimize Plug-Ins

Plugins are awesome and it seems every time you need your website to do something, there is a plugin. I caution you to only install and use the plugins that are the most essential. When a website includes too many WordPress plugins, it could slow down and your site and also could be a threat to security. An outdated WordPress plugin is a hacker’s dream…and your nightmare.

Other issues, such as the website crashing frequently, can occur when there is an abundance of plugins running at once. Choose the most efficient and important ones and ditch the rest.

 

Use A Content Delivery Network to Speed up your site

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) works very well in increasing the speed of your loading time and also saves a substantial amount of bandwidth on your site.

When a CDN is in use, the files for the specific website are hosted on servers around the globe. Visitors are then able to download the content from the server that is closest to their location. This process will eliminate the bandwidth from one site and will spread it across an entire network.

 

Quality Website Hosting (It’s Worth Every Penny)

Do your homework when it comes to finding the right host for your website. If the price is very low, chances are the bandwidth is low too and you won’t be getting the speedy load times your site requires.

It’s worth your time to do a little research ahead of time. You don’t want to find out after the site is set up that it is unable to handle your content.

I use SiteGround for a large majority of my clients and have had terrific results and support.

 

Conclusion

It is evident that your attorney site must load as quickly as possible to continue to increase your ranking, gain more visitors and hopefully new clients.

If you are familiar with developing your website from the back-end, then you are already one step ahead of the game. Often, attorneys find that after working on cases all day, there is little time to focus on tweaking their website. If this is the case, consider hiring an experienced professional to handle these tasks for you.

If you would like to find out more about working with an SEO professional, check out the following articles: 3 Tips For Lawyers Looking To Hire A SEO Professional For A Website Audit and Attorney Online Marketing: Get Started On The Right Foot.