How fast should my website load?
Google recommends page loading time under two seconds: “Two seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half-second.”
Load speed can make or break a website
We all want to have a fast website, and loading time is not just a matter of preference. Site load speed has a significant impact on a site’s success.
The longer it takes a website to load, the more its bounce rate will increase. High bounce rates tell search engines that users don’t find the page content beneficial. When this happens, the rankings will take a hit. eCommerce sites will inevitably lose customers if their checkout page is just a little bit slower than their competition.
Site Speed understands the importance of making your website load faster.
Customers have higher expectations than ever and have a higher chance of exiting from your website if it doesn’t load in under 3 seconds. We know that you have invested in your website, and we also know that paid ads can be expensive.
Your website should load fast. That’s why we guarantee to make your site load faster!
Every business owner should focus on three things:
- Decrease your website’s bounce rate
- Increase your website’s conversion rate
- Make more money
Making your website site lightning fast is the first step to success…
In 2006, Amazon discovered that every 100ms in added page load time cost them 1% in sales. This discovery is now one of the most referenced data points surrounding page speed and web performance, standing the test of time as a clear example of why having a fast site is essential
How can a faster website help me?
Better Revenue
Website speed can impact sales and search engine performance, meaning a slower eCommerce site will pay the price when lacking the speed of the competition. For example: if you're running an eCommerce site that makes $10,000 per day, a one second page delay could cost you $250,000 annually in lost sales.
Fewer Site Issues
A slow, non-responsive, or overloaded site can destroy your business. This is the reason so many high revenue businesses focus on website optimization and maintenance. Just dropping a few hundred milliseconds in load time can make a huge difference in conversions.
Increased Satisfaction
Customers' expectations are high! For every second your website loads after two seconds, you have a 9% per second increase in potentially losing that customer. Under two seconds is the goal for eCommerce.
Decreased Abandonment
A one to two-second page load time makes users feel in control. But after 10 seconds, their attention is practically non-existent, and they're highly unlikely to visit again. As the seconds to load increase, so does the bounce rate. Regardless of the products you're offering, it's not going to compensate for the consumer's patience.
Better Visitor Retention
If you have an e-commerce site, a few seconds of delay could mean a substantial loss of future revenue from repeat sales. It's not only the consumers that will think badly; the search engines will also when you have a high bounce rate.
Mobile Expectations
In today's world, where people's mobile phones have fast internet, such as 4G & 5GUW, 85% of mobile users expect pages to load as fast or faster than on a desktop. One study found that some shoppers expect pages to load instantly on mobile. Unfortunately, they are typically not as fast as desktop unless they're optimized.
Higher Search Rankings
Google states page speed is a direct ranking factor. Now more than ever since their recent algorithm update in May 2021. However, speed can also affect rankings indirectly by reducing the bounce rate and reducing dwell time.
Hosting Requirements
Efficient websites pull less load on servers. Handling more customers without needing a server upgrade means less money spent on unnecessary upgrades. You may be paying for a server that's more power than required.
Referrals
A good user experience will result in a satisfied customer. A satisfied customer is much more likely to refer their friends by word of mouth or share your site URL and the products you're selling. It's free advertising.
"It is much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than it is to double your traffic"
What services do we provide and how can we help you?
Housecleaning
A website can only run as fast and efficiently as its slowest component. Databases can fill up quickly with outdated data from old products or deleted plugins that keep piling up in a junk pile. Eliminating this junk will free-up resources and allow WordPress to do what it does best instead of wasting its time skating around the trash.
Caching
Caching your website is one of the best optimizations one can make. Without caching, WordPress must hand-stitch every page you visit. While this is typically quick with a well-designed website and an optimized and robust server, it still adds overhead and takes longer without caching. With caching, instead of hand stitching your WordPress pages together, WordPress pre-prints your pages so that when someone visits your site, it has the page ready and sends it immediately. That is what page caching does. It is a must more efficient way of webpage rendering.
Image Optimization
Today is all about high-resolution images, 4K video, and virtual reality where the images are required to be huge! If you are purchasing beautiful images online for your products or site, or even taking making product images with your cell phone, you could end up with a single image being a larger file size than an entire song. Considering there is next to no visible difference between a 4MB image and a 1 MB image on your home page or a viewing a 1 MB image vs. a 100KB image on your cell phone, there’s just no reason to use images of that size.
Database Cleanup
The database of a website is similar to a library. When a site is brand new, everything is organized easy to find, making books fast to retrieve. However, as time goes on, you realize that the librarian is quite the hoarder. Books that nobody will use remain on the shelves, popular books are scattered across the library, and the index hasn’t been updated since it opened. Since every WordPress page load involves retrieving specific information from a database, the database must be maintained to ensure streamlined functionality. Once we reorganize the books and fire the librarian, your site will take a turn for the better.
Updates
Regardless of what people say, WordPress and plugin updates exist to serve a purpose. Updates release new features, resolve bugs, improve security, site stability, and even performance in many cases. At times, an update may not play well with your site, but it is a necessary evil. Yet, if your site responsiveness is resolvable with an update, it may just be an attended upgrade to resolve some speed issues.
Code Optimization
Typically, a website's front-end code is filled with hundreds of lines of code and javascript requests that have no place on that particular page. A streamlined website requests and delivers what is necessary to that visitor's request. By eliminating these unnecessary requests and reducing the code the server has to read in order to render your site to the visitor requesting it, your visitor now spends less time waiting for the site to load and more time interacting with it. Isn't that the point?
Advanced Caching
The larger and more successful your site is, the harder it is to manage and keep it running smoothly. The more WordPress has more to manage; it becomes critical that various aspects of the site are cached appropriately for the site to run the way it's designed. Advanced caching allows us to work on some of the foundation levels of your site with database queries, objects, and next-level advanced page caching to ensure that every part of the site is fine-tuned to maximize your resources.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce, is easily one of the most popular e-commerce systems globally, thanks to its integration and functionality with WordPress. As with all e-commerce software, as your site grows in sales, products offered, and is consistently increasing in traffic, more horsepower is required to keep up with the increasing information it has to manage. It often goes unnoticed just how direct an impact speed has on your business with e-commerce as sales drop with each second of load time. By reorganizing your database to manage the data on hand more efficiently, you can get back the performance you expect from your website.
Hosting Migration & Optimization
If you own the fastest car in the world, but traffic is down to one lane for construction, you’re stuck crawling along with everyone around you until the traffic clears. Websites work precisely the same way with their hosting. If your website is a finely-tuned machine, but it’s waiting on an overcrowded host, your visitors will only experience your host’s slowness, not your site’s speed. Bad hosting prevents site performance, whether your slow hosting is due to trusting a cheap 3rd-party host or using your server with stock settings. That’s why Level 1 & Level 2 Optimizations come with either a hosting migration OR a server optimization, depending on your website’s current setup.
Site Load Distribution
When a visitor visits your site, their browser demands the attention of your server. With smaller or lower traffic websites, most servers can handle the requests with little to no issues. However, as your site grows, it’s going to demand more power to keep up with all its visitors. This is where the benefits of a CDN come in. When your site gets overloaded with requests, basic traffic can be handed off to a more specialized service like a CDN. Meanwhile, more complex traffic such as checkout pages are handled by your server without the additional load from all around the world.
Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped by almost 20%
A broker could lose millions in revenue if their electronic trading platform is just 5 milliseconds behind the competition.
Level 1 Optimization
Great for blogs & low traffic sites
$
399
99 CA
- Average site load improved by: 100%
- Page Caching
- Image Lazyloading
- Image Optimization
- Javascript Optimization
- CSS Optimization
- Minify HTML
- Basic Housecleaning
More Details
*30 Day Warranty
Level 2 Optimization
Great for high traffic sites
$
599
99 CA
- Average site load improved by: 125%
- Level 1 Optimization plus:
- Server Configuration Optimization
- Hosting Migration
- CDN Configuration
- Speed Diagnositcs
- WooCommerce Optimization
- Inline CSS
More Details
*30 Day Warranty
Popular
Level 3 Optimization
Great for sites that must run 100%
$
999
99 CA
- Average site load improved by: 150%
- Level 2 Optimization plus:
- Advanced image lazy loading
- webp image configuration
- webp image conversion
- Pagespeed Score Optimization
- Core Web Vitals Optimization
- Defer Scripting
More Details
*30 Day Warranty
"The best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google Search"
Frequently Asked Questions
Study after study has shown that every significant online sales and marketing metric is impacted directly by site speed. Site stability, uptime, and speed impact conversion rates, abandonment rates, ad click-throughs, and overall customer satisfaction.
Generally, most visitors have an expectation that your site will load in less than 2 seconds. Most studies suggest sites that take over 2 seconds to load, can expect a 7% conversion loss or ad revenue per second for EVERY second it takes to load your site. And that’s not for mobile! Those are figures for desktop users. So, If the majority of your site traffic comes from mobile devices, those numbers go up from there. This is why Google now considers load speed for mobile devices when ranking your site against other sites.
If you’re trying to beat out the competition and maximize your WordPress install without having to change your hosting infrastructure or re-code your site’s themes and plugins, Level 2 Optimization will deliver on that.
Suppose you suspect that your hosting infrastructure is also part of the problem. In that case, Level 3 Optimization is more tailored to that purpose – whether you’re looking to switch your hosting or optimize the dedicated hosting setup you have now.
Regardless of which package you choose, you will notice an immediate improvement in load times and stability once one is complete. For most businesses, Level 2 Optimization will offer the improvement you are looking for. Since it is designed to pull every ounce out of your existing WordPress installation and webhost. This is exactly why it is the most popular package. However, WordPress can only move as fast as the host it is on.
Level 1 Optimization is typically best suited for smaller, low-traffic personal or business websites that need a slight improvement over their current setup. Level 1 Optimization is focused on minimum caching and configuration required to shed a little weight off the server. That is precisely what makes the Level 1 Optimization suitable for smaller sites.
Our Level 2 & Level 3 packages focus on database, JavaScript, server configurations, and more aggressive caching and WordPress configurations.
The Level 2 package is our most popular package. Its focus is to optimize your website without rebuilding it or changing your web host. Regardless of whether your site is a personal or professional blog, small business, or something more complex like an e-commerce site, this is most likely the correct package for you.
The Level 3 Optimization package is designed to eliminate every roadblock your site has to improve the site speed short of rebuilding portions of it. Suppose your site is hosted on a VPS, dedicated server, or you are willing to switch to a different web host to solve the problem. In that case, Level 3 Optimization is designed to handle just that and is the ideal choice for busy and/or very complex websites.
We developed our optimization packages to help your site deliver on performance. We aim to provide a 2-3s minimum site load time even with our Level 1 Optimization. However, factors like poor quality hosting or third-party scripts can hinder that. If your host is under-powered or spreads its resources too thin, the impact will typically be noticeable. For example, it’s very common for an optimized site to take more than 4 seconds to load on a poor-quality host. This same site may load in under 2 seconds on a high-quality host. With this considered, if you’re looking to get the most speed out of your site, you may want to be open-minded when it comes to committing to hosting and other 3rd party providers. If you want to max out your site’s performance and are willing to change your hosting infrastructure, you may want to consider the Level 3 Optimization Package.
It all depends on which plan you purchase and several other factors. The Level 1 Optimization package will make your site as fast as possible, WITHOUT changing your hosting infrastructure or altering the code of your site. So, if you’re opposed to switching hosts and your current host is not providing adequate horsepower to your site, then yes, this package would offer the best you can typically get. Now, if you’re trying to squeeze every ounce of speed out of your site and you are open to taking the necessary steps to get the most speed out of your site, our Level 3 Optimization package is better designed to do just that.
Ultimately, your site can only become so fast, as there is always a theoretical limit. We aim to deliver great speed without altering the functionality of your site.
It is dependent on the package chosen and if it is possible without breaking your site. Some speed reports make suggestions that are just wrong.
Getting an A grade may appear great and make you feel good, but depending on your site, they may be wrong. Popular speed reporting pages are known for requesting modifications that can break your site’s functionality or changes to software or websites out of your control; these pages are also known for being a bit behind the technology curve or generic on the “correct” type of modification to use on your and other modern websites. One example is Google PageSpeed, which occasionally requests changes to code in Google’s services (like Google Analytics). So, you obviously can’t change something that you cannot control.
Another ironic example is that many of the most successful speed testing sites in the world will grade you an F regardless of how fast your site is. Run Google through one of these, and the results may surprise you. At times, they offer suggestions to follow the rule books. So, what matters is the actual speed of the site. If your site loads in 1 second (considered better than perfect), it doesn’t particularly matter that you have an A or F score. Since we are against impacting our customer’s business interests by making changes that only have theoretically beneficial impacts (despite their very real-world consequences), we focus instead on the actual site speed and performance since this has been repeatedly tested and proven time and time again to be the only metric that improves the site’s overall marketing and performance health.
Others focus on small issues with a suggested optimization that may improve a site’s speed by a tenth of a second while ignoring issues causing 5s delays. Others are just recommendations or suggestions out of your control.
While some of these suggestions are beneficial and offer insight into potential issues, others can be 100% technically accurate, but that will 100% break your site. These speed testers do not factor in that all sites are not the same. When optimizing your site, we consider all of these concerns and apply the optimizations that:
- Have a positive and noticeable impact
- Maintain the sites functionality
- Continues to perform daily
Yes. E-commerce sites like WooCommerce, blogs w/ comments, high traffic sites, and other interactive sites require more processing power to function as expected. For example, a prevalent complaint amongst e-commerce site owners is that the checkout page is often slow. This may be expected since the site must process a credit card and the order, calculate shipping/taxes, etc. For a busy site, this is typically happening for several customers at a time. Check-put pages are slower by default. With that, when you take a site that is configured with stock settings and add the load of e-commerce processing, you typically find that all kinds of misconfigurations are artificially slowing the checkout page – often the sort that you will never see in a speed report from significant vendors like GT Metrix or Pingdom. And suppose you’re using a dedicated server, VPS server, or low-quality hosting on top of that. In that case, you can see a couple that slows down with either stock server settings (and their slowdowns) or just lack the power or efficiency for the site to operate smoothly. Ultimately, when you have a slow checkout page, you can feel the tie between speed and conversion more than you would with any other type of site. That’s why Level 2 & Level 3 Optimizations are specifically designed to handle those sorts of problems.
We’ll provide you with reports from 3 major speed tests sites, including Google Pagespeed, to showcase the improvements made and how your loads times differ from start to finish.
We specialize in website optimization. It is better to leave the marketing expertise to the marketing professionals, just as the marketing professionals will leave optimization to optimization professionals. Good marketing firms typically do not make good speed optimization firms, and good optimization firms do not make good marketing firms. Suppose your focus is to boost the performance & speed of your site. You do not want to be vendor locked with a marketing firm’s hosting, locked into long-term marketing contracts, or provided with sub-par website speed enhancements; you’ll want to work with a team that focuses on speed optimization instead of a marketing team. Don’t get us wrong; search engine optimization (SEO) is essential. Still, marketing firms concentrate on optimizing your site differently, such as being found on Google and other search engines, not Speed! One marketing firm we can recommend is Labyrinth Conversions. They have a strong history of delivering on SEO and Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
For standard personal sites and blogs the Level 1 Optimization Package should work well for you.
For eCommerce & busy sites we suggest the Level 2 or Level 3 Optimization Package. If you begin with Level 2 and we feel Level 3 would be more beneficial, we can always upgrade the package.
That’s great! We work with all hosts. We can still optimize your site for you. For WordPress optimized hosts, we suggest the Level 2 or Level 3 Optimization Package.
We only require your website URL, login and password for Level 1 Optimizations Packages. We will also require your DNS host and website host login credentials with Level 2 & Level 3 Optimization Packages.
We will optimize your site in order to reduce bounce rate. However, your overall sales will be determined by your content and prices.
Absolutley! Regardless of who setup your site, we can help push it to the speed loading limit.
Optimizations usually take 1-4 business days depending on the type of optimization package you choose, size of your site and the speed issues unique to your website.
Yes. Our Level 2 & Level 3 Optimization Packages includes our host migration service if your current hosting provider is part of the problem. As an alternative, we offer host migration as a completely managed service, including site migration and DNS change management.
Yes, Level 2 & Level 3 Optimization Packages include image compression.
Lazy loading is the delaying of load or calling of resources and/or objects until they are needed in order to improve performance and reduce system resources. For example, if a web page has images that the user has to scroll down to see, you can display a placeholder on page load and lazy load the full images only when the user arrives at its location.
Yes, Level 2 & Level 3 Optimization Packages include image & video lazy loading.
Javascript Deferring is when the javascript is not run immediately upon site call and runs after the main information is loaded on the site in order to render the page faster.
Yes, Level 2 & Level 3 Optimization Packages include Javascript deferring, permitting the site is compatible with the modification.
Yes we do. But the more custom a site is, the more custom its optimizations must be.
Yes. Our speed optimizations work the across all platforms and you will notice the impact on mobile as well. However, some speed testing sites will recommend that you make your site responsive as part of optimization, and while that is a great idea, it’s something that is a more significant than just speeding up your site. If you do wish to make your site more responsive, we do offer other standalone services and can provide you with a quote that is specific to your site upon request.
Yes. Our Level 3 Optimization Package includes the host optimization service.
Yes, our objective is to make your site more responsive than it currently is. This is also dependent on the optimization package you choose and the theme your site is built with.
It is always a good idea to plan for some downtime. However, we try to complete our optimizations with little to no impact on your site uptime.
Yes, we do offer custom non WordPress optimization services. Please reach out to us to discuss options to improve your non WordPress site.
So whether your hosting setup is a four-lane highway or an six-lane highway, if only one lane is open, your visitors will be waiting in traffic for the site to load. If you suspect that your hosting infrastructure is also part of the problem or you have a dedicated hosting environment that you can control, our Total Optimization packages are designed to address that problem as well.
For even more advanced slowness problems, we do also have custom caching solutions beyond our optimization packages for qualified sites
Wow just wow! I tried everything to get my site fast and I could never get past 3 seconds. I reached out to Ken and now I'm loading in under 2 seconds!
I was told by another company that I needed a new website. LOL. I guess they need to step up their game because the team at Sitespeed thought otherwise...
1 second load on GTMetrix! Need I say more?
I went with the Level 1 package and I am very pleased! If I went from 5 secs to 2 secs to load my page with the entry package, would the top package load my site before I clicked on it? haha
Fast! Fast! Fast! Fast!
I blink and my site is loaded! Thanks so much guys!
I'm a small business owner. My site which is Ecommerce has about 1000 items on it. I always struggled to have it load the products quickly. Well no longer. The site runs like a new car.
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