When you regularly visit your WordPress site, it probably doesn’t seem slow because your web browser knows to utilise local caching. However new visitors will not have a cached version of your site, resulting with slow site speed upon first interaction. This affects your business when attracting new customers; a typical customer will only spend 8 seconds on your site at first glance before moving to the next. Undoubtedly, if your site doesn’t load, they probably won’t return.
We tend to measure a sites performance by utilising google page speed analysis tools such as Lighthouse or PageSpeed. Upon first glance, an un-optimised WordPress site analysis can be shocking and not ideal to attract new customers. Given that, the majority of visitors can be accessing your site on a mobile device.
There are many plugins and practices to help optimise, speed up and clean your site. These plugins can be useful however they tend to only focus on optimising the desktop version of your site. Todays website standards call for a mobile-first approach; prioritising a mobile-ready site build with a focus on performance over design.
What Can We Do?
Apart from a complete theme re-build; the next best approach is to upgrade your current WordPress site is to integrate a new type of optimisation through the use of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and PWA (Progressive Web App). This process includes converting/creating simplified AMP mobile versions of your websites pages to comply with search engines’ cache utilisation standards – Basically storing a simple cached version of your site on google so its super quick as pages are loaded in the background from google itself. This also means if your site is ever down, the amp version will still be available from google (offline mode). There are many other benefits including improved SEO, increased Google Adword performance and increased site traffic to name a few.
If you want to find out how we can provide mobile optimisation for your current site, please contact us for more information.
