Today’s website users have many options to choose from when they’re looking for an auto repair shop or any other type of business online. Just as it’s important for a website to look good no matter what device the website it’s being viewed upon, it’s equally important for a website to load quickly. If it doesn’t, the user is very likely to go somewhere else. In fact research shows that a website with a 3 second delay in load time can lose up to 20% of its visitors. That ultimately means loss of revenue for your shop! Unfortunately, that’s not the only negative impact that will come from a slow loading website.

Google has indicated that website load time is one of the factors used to rank pages. That means that if your website has a slow load time, its ranking in the search engines will suffer. In addition, Google measures bounce rate which is when a user visits a website and doesn’t go past the home page. When a user leaves your website after becoming frustrated with load time, your website’s bounce rate goes up. The result is a negative impact on your website’s search engine rankings.

There are several reasons for a slow loading website. One of the more common ones is using images that are not properly optimized for size and compression. Another one is using poorly written code when building a website. These can have a huge impact on performance. Some websites are built with a content management system. This means that the user can edit the website without having to change the code. The downside to some of these is that they add much more code to the webpage which further adds to the load time. One other reason that may cause a website to load slower than it should is if it’s being hosted on a cheap web host. A cheap web host will host many other sites on the same server which increases load time for all of them. A site that we like to use to test load time is https://gtmetrix.com/ and there are others. If you have a few minutes, you might want to test your website for load time. Another useful site that is good to check your website for errors is this one https://validator.w3.org/.

At Premier Auto Web, we work hard to make sure our client’s websites load fast. Give us a call and we’d love to explain how!