Blogging and building an online empire is more than simply writing and fancy images. An online business is about increasing user engagement to a point where you’ll be able to convert them, achieving your bottom line. I’ve always told my clients to always have a purpose or bottom line in mind when starting a blog because this will keep your focus clear. With a clear focus, you can take the necessary steps to ensure you will achieve the desired outcome you set out to achieve and this means getting closer to success. However, again, this all depends on the way you engage your readers, ensuring they are happy with your blog and the content you have published.
I’m surprised at the amount of people who forget user experience depends on a lot more things than simply content. Over the past several months, I’ve outlined elements that contribute to an increase in blogging traffic and engagement. Here are a few:
- Content
- Navigation
- Reduced bounce rate
- Networking
However, I’m surprised by the amount of people who don’t consider “website speed” an issue when building their online business. Did you know your poor “web speed” contributes to a decrease in user engagement, increase bounce rate, and stagnant blog growth? Today, I want to elaborate on web site speed and why it’s so important to keep testing it over several months.
What Is It EXACTLY?
Testing website speed is simply plugging your URL within a testing tool and finding out how long it takes for entire pages to load on your website. The longer it takes, the worse for user engagement because this means people are NOT able to read your content quickly and when they need it MOST. However, the quicker your page loads, the better because access to content they require is available right away. Here are some tools I’ve used with great success to test my website speed. I like these tools because they provide a detailed report on what I should change, my current speed, and I can even test from different locations:
What Can It Do for You?
Testing your website speed should be performed a few times a year because it will ensure everything is running optimally. This will also ensure nothing has happened along the way that has hindered your loading time. For example, here are a few things regular testing can help you figure out:
Server Status
Testing your speed regularly will ensure your sever is operating correctly and nothing has caused it to reduce response time. For example, I’ve had an episode where I tested my website and made adjustments to increase load time of my blog. However, within 3-4 days, my speed was down and this is even when NO new content or images were published. I checked to see if plugins had updated on my website, which caused it to slow down, but I could find nothing. After vigorous testing, I was able to find out my hosting provider had a fault on their end and this contributed to my site slowing down considerably in a short period of time.
I would NOT be able to find out what was going on if I didn’t test my website on a regular basis and make the right adjustments afterward.
Speed After Publishing
If you’re an avid blogger and continuously posting new content, then you have increased the chances of your site slowing down. How? Each time you publish content, you’re adding a load to your server in the form of content, images, videos, etc. It’s important you keep testing to ensure content published over several weeks has NOT affected the speed of your website and if so, you can always make changes if necessary. For example, after publishing “5” large posts on my blog, I needed to go back and optimize images and videos to ensure they were compressed because they were affecting my load time.
In the end, it’s important to keep in mind that load speed is very important for rankings and user engagement. Your audience has come to you to find a solution to their problem and when they do, it’ll build loyalty. Let’s imagine they can’t and what it will do for your blogs growth and conversion rate…right?
The main thing is it’s NOT hard to keep testing because you have FREE tools available to you when you need them. Here are two, which I’ve already listed above, you can start using today:
Click Here To Download John Chow’s New eBook, and Live The Dot Com Lifestyle!
