Why speed matters more than you think

Everyone has left a website before because it was too slow. Research has shown that people leave slow websites in seconds, taking their business elsewhere. Having a slow website isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s losing you customers. Also, Google prioritises page speed in search result rankings. If your website is slow, then it loses visitors and search ranking.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are page experience metrics Google uses to rank search results. They may have a fancy name, but they’re actually pretty simple. There are three main types of metrics. LCP is how fast the main page content loads. CLS is the stability of the page. How the content on the page jumps around or slides is unstable and frustrating. INP is how responsive page elements are to clicks and taps.

What makes a website slow?

There are few reasons why websites are slow. When you’re in charge of your website, you should monitor the following closely:

Unoptimised images — large, uncompressed photos are one of the biggest causes of slow loading times

Too many plugins — every plugin on a WordPress site adds some extra code that must be loaded, and can cause other plugins to malfunction

Cheap or overloaded hosting — if your website’s hosting cannot handle the traffic, everything slows down, regardless of how well the site itself is built

Individually, these might not seem like much, but they add up quickly, and a site suffering from all three at once can feel painfully slow to use.

What Sunneo does to keep sites fast

Speed is something we build in from the start, not something we try to fix at the end. We compress and properly sise images before they go anywhere near your website, keep the number of plugins to a sensible minimum, and recommend quality hosting that can actually cope with your traffic

We also test our builds against the Core Web Vitals measurements mentioned above, so we can catch and fix issues before your site goes live, rather than leaving you to discover them later

Ongoing care matters too

It is all well and good having a fast site on launch day, but speed can slowly diminish over time as content, plugins, features and other integrations increase. That is why we would recommend keeping an eye on your site’s performance regularly, or have someone do it.

A fast, smooth website is part of delivering an excellent customer experience and helps Google deliver more of those customers to you.

How to check your site speed

There are many easy to use tools to determine the speed of your site. One of these tools is PageSpeed Insights, a service offered by Google. It is important to use this service to check against Core Web Vitals periodically and see how your site is performing.

The reports can be challenging to understand since they will contain many numbers and unfamiliar words. Feel free to ask us to go over your results and to explain if there are any improvements that are needed.

Speed and the rest of the package

There are many things you must keep in mind when you design your site and the speed of the site is just one component. For example, a site that is fast but has poor design or a confusing layout will not help you convert your visitors into customers. We take the design, the content, the approachability, and other items into account when we are building a site. We want everything to work together in harmony toward the same objective and goal.

We take pride in getting the right balance of focus for each project, and we would appreciate the opportunity to show you how we can help you.

If you would like to contact us for a quote, please follow this link.