Mar 4, 2020
In this episode, my husband,
business partner, and tech extraordinaire, David, and I are talking
about why site speed can hurt your blog and how to fix
it.
Have you been blogging for a
bit, but you aren’t seeing the traffic you thought you’d see? Or is
your bounce rate super high?
If you’re dealing with issues
like these, perhaps your problem isn’t your content; perhaps your
site speed is to blame. In this episode
We're digging deep into why site
speed matters, and how to be sure that yours is where it needs to
be.
But first, if you’re new
here, I wanted to take a minute to explain what MiloTree is about
and what we offer to our customers, besides this podcast! I like to
call this the “MiloTree Umbrella.”
First off, if you are a new
blogger, or you’re thinking about being a blogger but you haven’t
started yet, we are here to help. Setting up your blog is what
holds back the majority of people who want to blog.
And we get it. Tech can be
confusing and it can make you procrastinate indefinitely. But lucky
for you, my husband and business partner, David, is a genius with
all the tech stuff.
So, if you head over
to MiloTree/BlogStart,
you can sign up for our blog start service. We will set up and
optimize your WordPress blog, and get everything in place for you
to begin creating content.
Then, once you have your
blog up and running, you’ll want to install our MiloTree pop-up on
your site. This allows you to grow your social media platforms,
email list, online shopping platforms, or whatever you want to
grow!
Go to
MiloTree
and click on the purple text in
the top right corner to start your free 30-day
trial and see how quickly you can begin to grow your
audience.
And then finally, David and
I are finally offering blog coaching for entrepreneurs! I’m so
excited about helping you all develop a real business through your
blog.
We are currently in our
first 6-week
entrepreneur coaching session, and we would love to
have you in a future group. If you aren’t getting the results you
want, come join us and let us help you reach your goals and build a
business that will grow with you.
Just click through to sign
up for
your spot in our next session.
Now let's get technical, without being too technical...
What Is Blog Site Speed and Why Does It
Matter?
Site speed, simply defined, is
how fast your blog pages load when someone comes to your
site.
Pretty simple, right? The
question though, is why should you care? David explains there are 2
reasons why site speed matters.
- You want to give your visitors a fantastic user
experience
- Site speed plays a role in how friendly Google judges
your site to be, and how much traffic they send you
- It will help lower your bounce rate because people will
want to stick around
Be Your Own User and Tester
If you want to know how quickly
your site loads, the best place to start is with your
eyes.
Be your own user, in other
words: go to your site and see how fast your pages download for
you. Do you find yourself waiting for the full page to
load?
David also recommends getting
out of your usual space to check your site speed.
If you’re like us, you’re
blessed with really fast internet at home. So, when you get on your
desktop in your home office, your site might load really
quickly.
But you need to know how it
loads for people on their phones, iPads, and for those with
slower internet. So, go to a coffee shop or local hangout, and
using only your cell phone data, see how quickly it
loads.
And obviously, if your pages
load slowly when you have optimal internet, you know you’ve got
some work to do.
What Exactly Is Slow Site Speed?
When you’re watching your site
load, do you notice that larger things like welcome banners take a
bit longer to fill in? Are you having to sit there and wait for
them to be done?
Next, can you scroll? Or is the
page frozen in the loading pattern, with the bottom half not filled
in yet?
These are the kinds of things
that make visitors leave your site before they ever even see what
you have to offer.
The Two Sides of Site Speed
Site speed encompasses several
different parts of your actual site. It’s not only what the user
sees. Site speed begins before the user sees anything.
- The server side - meaning how long does it take your
actual Wordpress (or other host) to load the site
itself.
- The user side - meaning how long it takes for the
actual content to load (photos, fonts, text, videos, banners,
etc.)
How to Have Good Site Speed? Get a Good
Host
If your site seems slow, or
you’ve had people complain about it taking a long time to load, you
can take some definite steps to speed things up.
But the best place to start is
with your hosting.
If you are currently paying less
than $3 per month for hosting, you may be at risk for less than
desirable site speed. If you’d like to know which hosts David
recommends, email me at jillian@milotree.com.
Use a Caching Plug-in to Help with Site
Speed
There are plug-ins to help with
almost everything on your site, but be careful, because too many
plug-ins can cause your site to be slow.
The first plug-in you need for
site speed is a great caching plug-in. Caching means your pages are
preloaded, in a sense.
So, the first person to visit
your site gets a full download, but following visitors get a
snapshot, of sorts, of the pages. Your site doesn’t have to go
through all the work of loading everything again; it uses the cache
it has built to show the pages.
We use and recommend
WP Rocket for our site cache. (This is our affiliate
link.)
Optimize Your Content for Site Speed
Your caching plug-in will help
on the server-side to bring the site up more quickly, but you’ve
got content that needs to download for the user.
So, what can you do to help your
photos, videos, and written content, including those awesome fonts
you used, to download more quickly?
The first step to take here is
to compress your images. Images take a long time to download, so
you need to reduce the file size.
Here again, there are plug-ins
that, when installed, automatically optimize your images for
you.
*We use WP
Smush for our photos.
This is a free plugin we also use.
How to Check Your Blog's Site
Speed?
If you’ve checked your site with
your own eyeballs, you’ve used the correct plug-ins to reduce load
time and to optimize your images, and it’s still slow, there are
some things you can do to figure out what’s going on.
A couple of tools that David
recommends are is GTmetrix and
Google Page Speed.
All that is required to use
these tools is to put in your URL and let the tool do its work. It
will load your page, analyze it, and tell you what is slowing it
down.
What Slows Our Sites Down?
We talked a little bit about how
plugins and photos can slow our site down. But the truth is, every
single thing you add to your site slows it down some.
Even adding another few words
affects your site speed. Now, a few words will have a negligible
effect, but another photo could add a second or more to the loading
speed.
Back in the early days of
blogging, before Google was the one setting all the rules, we could
add as many photos as we wanted to our posts. And I will admit to
being a little too in love with all my photos and not wanting to
leave any out.
So, you would see recipe posts
with upwards of a dozen photos of the finished recipe
alone.
Nowadays, I aim to only include
photos that serve a purpose.
The MiloTree
Plug-In
If you’re using the
MiloTree pop-up on your
site, David and I want
to reassure you that when he built our pop-up, he built it with
site speed in mind.
So while, yes, every single
thing you add to your site slows it down some, one thing you don’t
need to worry about is your MiloTree pop-up.
We barely scratched the surface
on site speed today, so stay tuned because David will be back to
help with additional technical content in the future.
If you have any questions for David
or me, please reach out to us at jillian@milotree.com or david@milotree.com.
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