A newsletter came in today from WordPress.com. If you don’t know, WordPress.com is a commercial website. It isn’t the same website that you get WordPress plugins from, which is WordPress.org. Anyway, the newsletter was about optimizing your website. They claim:
- Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.
- Almost half of consumers say they’ll try to refresh a page at least once when it takes 3 seconds to load. But 22% say they’ll close the tab, and 14% say they’ll visit a competitor’s site.
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
- If a website takes more than three seconds to load, 40% of the people will leave that site.
They offer a free tool you can use to check how well your site is optimized. You just need to past in your url and click the button and a report is generated instantly. If you don’t get the reults you were hoping for, you can try Site Kit from Google
How to Use Site Kit
I have Site Kit installed on this site, but it takes 72 hours to gather all of your Analytics if you hook it up to this Google kit too. Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. I found a video that gives a pretty good introduction to Site Kit, and how to use it.
When I ran this site through Site Kit, one of the recommended improves was to optimize this site using SMUSH. It’s the leading image optimization plugin – optimize, resize, and compress images, as well as convert images to WebP format for faster loading web pages.
If you take advantage of these tools in this article, you will have a much better optimized and faster loading website.