Have you considered that the speed of your website could potentially affect the conversion of a new patient? Having a fast website gives a good user experience (UX), and a satisfying UX leads to higher conversions. Take a look at your website, could the speed it loads be improved? I predict it could be and you might be surprised at the culprits that slow down your website.

It’s not just the users that could benefit from your site loading faster. Google now applies page speed times to its ranking algorithm, so optimising your site to outperform your competitors will help to improve your overall search rankings. Faster sites create happy users. If a site is slow visitors spend less time there. Users place a lot of value in speed — which is why Google take site speed into account in their search rankings.

Loading speed can affect all devices (desktop, tablet, mobile) but I predict if you log in to your Google Analytics account, you’ll likely see that people generally access your website from a mobile a device more often than from a desktop. Consider how your site reacts when a potential new patient is attempting to visit your site on their mobile without a Wi-Fi connection. A slow loading website on a mobile phone will likely be closed before you’ve had a chance to read anything and it could be contributing to the lack of people completing a contact form on your website to discover more information about a treatment or calling you to book an appointment.

Things to consider that could be slowing down your website:

• Image resolution and size – Do you really need an image on your site that’s 5000px x 2500px and is 3mb? Probably not. I suggest removing or reducing the size.
• Do your images serve the device they are being displayed on? – A banner that looks fabulous on a desktop may not transfer so readily to a mobile device and vice versa so make sure you’re considering each platform and adjust your content accordingly.
• Are your pages very image heavy? – Smile galleries are usually the culprit for this! There are a few ways you could display your images without including a page full of 20+ images. Also consider using different formats for promoting your smile transformations such as video or written testimonials from happy patients.
• Are you using lots of plugins on your website? – If the plugins aren’t adding anything to the UX, I suggest you remove them to keep the site running smoother.
• How is the coding of your website loaded, does it all load before you see anything on the page? – Moving Javascripts and CSS code into your footer could help things load faster.
• Does your website cache? – For users that come back to a website, having a site cache means it will load faster.

We recently worked on a website that had a page load speed of 8 seconds; when we looked at the page size it was nearly 2mb (there were a lot of images on the page and a lot of code). After much compressing, setting up caching and streamlining the vast amount of plugins installed we managed to reduce it to 1.8 seconds with a page size of 347kbs (a huge improvement).

Perhaps now is a good time to see how quickly your website pages load. If it’s slow and clunky let’s talk. Call 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.