Friday RoundUp: The Importance of Page Speed

Welcome to Friday Round up. It is Friday, February 10, 2017. Today's topic is the importance of page speed. Hello everyone, I am John Peterson with Develare.

We had an emergency meeting with one of our clients. It was called on Wednesday of this week. I got a call Wednesday morning, said, "Hey, we need to book you for a meeting this afternoon. There's something going on with the website. We need to have a call." Of course, I took a look at it right away and ran some testing tools on it. Leads had fallen off of the website, like just fallen off a cliff. This was over the last few weeks. They had fallen off a cliff, there were thousands of dollars in ad words being spent sending traffic to the site.

No result. That's a big deal. I whipped out a tool called GTmetrix, and I ran an analysis on the site. It came back, and it gave us very sporadic results. Sometimes it would be like a C or a D, and other times it would be an E. None of them are great scores. We noticed that sometimes it would be just these weird links in there linking to weird domains which I'm not going to mention. We were trying to figure out what was going on there, and we saw this sporadic malware was injecting these links, which would call some more links, which would call some more links and of course that just brought the website down to a crawl. Website was taking forever to load.

We went in there, took a look at that. While we were in there, we improved some other areas that needed to be changed. We reduced the image sizes, we reduced the page requests, we reduced a number of other things, just sped the website right up. When the malware wasn't hitting, it would be like high B in terms of page score. It's just like scores whenever you're in school, like A is awesome, B is good, C is eh, D mmm not so good. We got them up to a high B, and then yeah. We got them up to a high B, shut off unnecessary plug-ins. We actually reduced the page size by doing these optimizations by 26.5%. We reduced the page requests once the malware was kicked out of there by 41%.

All of this streamlining combined ended up speeding up the website by 153%. Well, so these numbers are great. More importantly, as soon as we started doing these optimizations, leads started coming in within the hour. It was like night and day.

You might be wondering, "What's my page speed?" Well, there's a couple of tools out there. We already mentioned one of them, GTmetrix. They've got a free tool out there. Put it in your domain for your website, you put in your URL, plug it in, hit analyze. It'll go out there, check out your website, give you actionable results on what you need to do to fix it. If you're not a developer, this is not going to be your cup of tea. Find yourself a developer, that go out and make these fixes for you. Now, the other tool out there is the Google Mobile-Friendly Tester. It's got a number of things it'll look at to see if your website is mobile-friendly. As a part of that, it'll tell you your page speed. A is for awesome, that's what you're shooting for. If you're not scoring an A, you're Friday Roundup The importance of Page Speed Page 3 of leaving money on the table.

If you have any questions, want some more direction, maybe some more follow up on some issues you're having, please leave some comments below the video here. Happy to chime in there, see what we can do to help you out. We'll also be adding some resources in there. Links to the GTmetrix site, links to the Google Mobile-Friendly Tester tool. We'll also be putting a link in there for another resource. Stay tuned, check out those comments below.

Thank you for tuning in. I'm John Peterson with Develare, signing off