Could your insurance website best be described as a turtle, rather than a cheetah? While slow and steady might win the race in some contexts, when it comes to your website loading time, there's not a lot of success to find in a slow-loading website. While your website content could be extraordinary and your products might market themselves, a slow-loading website can slow down your insurance marketing.
Why Speed Up Your Website?
While a short delay in website loading may not seem like much time, it is. Your clients and leads have the expectation that your website will load quickly and seamlessly. According to Crazy Egg, a one-second delay in loading time leads to 11 percent fewer page views and seven percent fewer conversations, all this because of a single second! Customer satisfaction also decreases. People tend to wait for a maximum of three seconds before abandoning your website altogether.
How can you improve your website conversions? Sometimes it's not about amazing copy and the ultimate deal; it's about website loading time. Walmart found that people who converted had been on a page that loaded twice as quickly as those who did not convert. Large websites like Walmart and Amazon experience significant sales losses when their websites slow down, and that's true even though people are motivated to go to these websites. What will your website experience be?
How You Can Improve Website Speed
A best practice is for a website to load in three seconds or less. However, most websites do not load that quickly. By improving your speed, you can edge ahead of others in your area.
If seconds really do count, how can you improve your website loading speed?
Start with a good foundation. Go for a faster-loading theme or design. Your design is important, but it should not take ages to load and undermine your efforts to promote your business online. If you're using a template, look at templates that are ranked by speed, and choose one that suits your business and is also fast.
The more complex your website page, the longer it will take to load. For instance, if you have a lot of images on your website or lots of Javascript files, this slows down your site. If you use a template to create your website, this can also make your code messy. Removing unnecessary code such as line breaks, indents, and even white space from each page can help improve loading time. Use plugins like WordPress Rocket to combine and clean up files.
Files on your page generally load in order, so your whole page can be waiting for one file to load before it moves onto the next. Allow your files to load asynchronously instead. This means that even if there's one slow part of your page, everything around it can load.
Add caching plugins to your website. This allows return visitors to get a better response time because they already have a version of your website cached.
Are you looking for help with your website development? At American Agents Alliance, we offer SEO services that help you bring your insurance marketing to a new level. Contact us about these and many other membership benefits today.
