Does Website Load Speed Matter

Note: this transcript is mostly unedited. I’m using HappyScribe (affiliate link) speech to text app for my transcriptions.

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Does website load speed matter?
Is your website turtle slower or Cheetah fast?
It is a question because website speed does matter. Oftentimes I’m asked why do I need a website? When I can use social networks and Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn, and all these people and I can run my business fine on that.

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And I say yes, why would you need to have a website when you have all these other things? Because there are lots around a website where you have to do, but it’s wanted you to be aware of what you’re doing on Facebook or Instagram and all these other areas social networks, you’re renting the space there. It’s not your own. You have to buy by their rules. And so that’s there’s a least that’s associated with the leases called the terms and service.

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A connotation is that it’s sharecropping that you’re helping them create wealth. Create wealth by giving them data that they can use to sell to advertisers, to target, by the target you for advertisements. And so in the Adage that the Adage applies very and that if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product. The flip side is if you don’t have a website is you have to ask the is this a hobby that you have between one nine to five gigs in the next nine to five gigs?

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Or are you running a business quick drink of water there? And are you serious about this, or is this a temporary gig that you’re doing?

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The special case is a starting full-fledged website. Get hosting and a simple package put up one page which says, welcome to I’m website launching in in time frame quarter four-quarter, one quarter three or whatever. Here’s a Contact US page and then a link to your social profiles. That would be the right way to go about not having a website but getting going with that.

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And it also lots of things that show that your corner of the internet. Look, I’m haven’t got going yet.

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But here I am. So why does speed matter for a website? Well, it’s expectations. People expect to have things instantly.

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Yes, it’s instant gratification, but people expect things to happen. If most people go on to social networks and Amazon and eBay and Google and news sites and being and they expect things to happen at a certain speed. If your website does not reach those expectations, then people will get dissatisfaction because this website doesn’t load fast. And why does speed matter? Well, for sales serious, we’re all trying to make sales to make our business work.

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And if people must wait for a long time, then they might get impatient. More than likely get impatient. And the patient equals oftentimes leads to frustration, frustration to disillusion. Disillusionment equals. People leave your website and go to your competitor and buy their stuff instead of yours, which is what you’re trying to achieve and what I want you to help with.

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And it was also why speed matters. Think about the user experience. Here is simple user experience is not online. It’s offline. My local grocery store.

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Yeah. You’ve been in a grocery store. If you go into a grocery store. What for me? What’s the worst part about a grocery store is when you’d rather all your goodies and they’re in their shopping basket and then you have to go to the checkout and then you ended up waiting and waiting and waiting until the person and the three or four people in the queue ahead of you to put on.

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But does all those things that take forever and it’s a waste of time. And does that mean I get to buy the crisps and the chocolate bars a lot that no, I don’t? It’s a waste of my time. So, my local grocery store has brought in these little handheld scanners where you scan your loyalty card and then you get this handheld scanner. Every time you grab your milk or your butter, your cheese, you scan it, put it into the shopping bag.

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You get up to the special till you scan this thing. Yes, everything is there. Pay away. You go to reduce my stress and increased my enjoyment factor. So that’s my user experience has been increased and it’s no different for you and your website.

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If you can increase the user experience, improve the user experience for people, then they’re going to stay. They’ll buy from you and do more on your website. Furthermore, the simple question is why speed manage. Do you want people to wait? I hope you’re not wanting them to wait for no reason at all.

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So how do you determine if your website is Cheetah eat a faster turtle slow? Well, there are tools to make all that happen. Believe it or not, you don’t have to download any apps to your phone at all. You should be doing this on your desktop or your laptop. Get Metrics is one tools Kingdom.

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Com webpage test or on another one and the best one that I like to use. Google Page Speed Insights and is that if you type in Google Page Speed Insights, you will get to the place where that has it. And it’s the standard and web performance metrics. There’s another tool from Google.It’s called Lighthouse. Lighthouse tests not page speed, which Google Page Speed inside does, but it tests your SEO and your accessibility and other kinds of things on your website.

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And which one do you use? I use the Google Page Speed Insight because Ping Metrics uses a Lighthouse tool that Kingdom uses Lighthouse. So, I prefer to go to the main source, and it is yeah, it’s a little bit techy, but learning to run your business must sometimes be a little bit. You must learn a few things. So, there are two sides to I’ll get into the field versus the lab data and there’s a lot of information on it.

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What does it look like when you go to Page Speed Insights and you load up your website? Here’s Evocative Media and they’ve loaded up their website. And unfortunately, these I’m cutting off.

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Oh, there it is. That’s a little better. Evocative Media. Their speed is 18. And as you can see right below, their name is zero to 49 is red, 90 to 100 is green.

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And this is lab data, which is okay. The largest is at the bottom left where it is the large content full paint with the little blue ribbon there.And that’s 20 seconds! It takes 20 seconds for the mobile to load onto the page onto your screen. And that’s what the large control paint is.And then the time to interactive is how long does that website take before you can start interacting with it?

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And that’s 26.4 seconds in the round. That up, that’s 30 seconds. It takes 30 seconds for that website to get to the point where you can scroll, hit a menu or do something like that. Let’s look at another website. Here’s another one not necessarily better.

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It’s in the same category. Same situation here’s a third one certainly faster. It’s in the yellows now, but it’s in the yellows and 6 seconds for the large colourful paint. That’s not bad. And 8 seconds for the time.

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The interactive. That’s not bad, but it’s still failing. This thing is called Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals is a little blue ribbon you see on the number red number two and red number three. Google has come up with something called the Web Core Vials, which is some minimum standards that websites should achieve for things.And the large colourful paint, the cumulative layout shift and something and a few others are what makes up the core website of him taking a drink of water here.

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If you hear and this website passes the cumulative layout shift but does not pass a large content of paint.I believe it’s 2.5 or 2.8 seconds to load. Is that so this one also is another example. And here’s the final example. And this is as my website, I don’t have massive amounts of traffic.

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I don’t know what the threshold is to get field data, but I don’t have it now. Besides, this is true data. This is 2.1second to load. This is my home page. You can go cheque it out and the time is interactive.

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Three 9 seconds for you to interact with the home page. Other pages are a little bit faster and a CLS is zero. So, when is speed important? That’s a very good question. Always.

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It’s always important. It’s not important. Let’s put it that way. So when is important? on mobile, because most people do things on the internet, on mobile.

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Less important with desktop and tablet. Which websites are the fastest ones if you’re to go build? I do it in WordPress because that’s the easiest and most widely. But there are other options available. Some you’ve never heard of Drupal in Jumla, but there’s Wix and Squarespace and Squarespace. You’ve heard of Shopify, Weebly.

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But if you look at the market here, WordPress has ten of all websites in the world for all in the world are running WordPress. So, they’re not just a blogging platform. New York Times runs a WordPress website as a content management system. It is WordPress that has the majority of the 2/3 of that market, so it’s their player. But what makes a website fast?

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Well, some of the stuff that’s underneath the hood and inside the engine of a website, it’s the hosting are things called themes. And yeah, it’s not so much the words on the page. Yeah, it’s the images and it is videos. Because those are oftentimes large, and it takes a long to load them.

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But it’s other things that are on the backside of the underside of under the hood of a website that is causing all this to be slow. So that goes on to the next question, how do you improve the speed of a website? Well, let’s go back to this. Evocative media dot com here and we’ll scroll down to the middle or the bottom of the page, and you will see that Google tells you exactly what it is.

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So, you see that the times here, but they’ll tell you exactly what to do. Serve images in action. Reduce that. Reduce this. Reduce this.

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Eliminate that, defer that, properly sized image, JavaScript. Yes. Perhaps a lot of that is Greek to you. And that’s okay.

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That is Greek. The point being is that they tell you exactly. Google tells you exactly what you need to do to improve the speed. So, if you see on the right column, those are seconds. So, six plus four plus three and a half to three and a half to three and a half.

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That equals 20 seconds. And that’s a large control paint there. Right. So what’s at six and twelve is 18 seconds. So, there we go.

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18 out of 20 seconds can be if you improve those things that improve your load time. From Turtle slow to Cheetah fast, why does speed why matter?
Well, let’s try with a word, for example, using WordPress because I’m quite comfortable and familiar with it. So, here’s the thing to do with your WordPress website or any other website that you have. Create a new page or a new post. If you have a blog post, my apologies there.

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That’s what running a home office is about. When the phone rings, you have to kind of work through this thing. But there we go. So that was kind of unexpected. But there we go.

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That’s a real live video and audio. When the telephone rings, often, it’s just a scammer that rings. It’s not anybody that’s phone because of nobody phone landlines. But we do have one. The baseline is to take one of you to create a new page or new blog posts and publish it.

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Run it through the page feed Insight using the incognito mode of Chrome browser and see what the number comes up with. If it comes up at 80 or comes up at 70 or 50 or worse, comes at 90, that is the fastest. You will get that web page to load. You put any words on that page. Text is not much.

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You put any images, you put, any videos, it will slow down that page. So that is the baseline is testing it. It comes up to 50.Then you know that there’s something going on with your website that is limiting the speed of your website, and it could be the different plugins. It could be your theme.

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It could be your hosting. There are so many different things, but it is possible to solve them.

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And it is these things, images, various plugins and themes. And you’re hosting, which is creating, causing the speed to be very slow. So, what happens if you ignore your speed? It’s a downward spiral. Things go downhill!

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You get less traffic, and you get fewer signs up so you get fewer phone calls. You get fewer sales, you get left behind.A vicious downward spiral circle, which treadmill that you don’t want to be going on because that is a negative situation.Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching.

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Why is Web speed website speed important? Urban Renstrom from urban Renstrom dot calm.