Ok, let’s talk about the speed of your law website
- What slows down your website?
- How can you improve it?
- How can you assess your website speed?
- Why is it important to have a high-performance website?
Everyone wants a website that loads fast, fundamentally a website that turns visitors into loyal clients. For a law firm speed is very important; you could have 10-stars content and an astonishing website design, but without great speed, these factors may look powerless. Having a slow website is like experiencing a slow service at a restaurant, thus leading to low engine ranking and negative experiences that will cause visitors to turn to competitors, which is something we don’t want right?
Let’s get to the actual point: what slows down your website?
Well, various factors can impact how your website works and your law firm should be fast enough to identify these factors and turn them into a competitive advantage.
Some of the most well known factors affecting the speed of your website are:
– Page weight
Owning a website full of video and HD images, heavy CSS files, and overloading texts generate a heavy page which takes longer to load due to its large sizes. Although nowadays it has been harder to reduce page weight due to the new complexities, it is not impossible. This can be achieved by compressing images using tools like ImageOptim and Kraken so as to keep their quality. Another factor affecting your website speed is poorly written JavaScript. To solve this problem you should run some speed tests using for example Web Page Test. This will point out which script slows your website down.
The weight of your website’s page can seriously impact your speed so start using Wp Rocket. Wp Rocket is basically an optimizing plug in that helps improve the speed of your WordPress website. The real question is how does this improve your website’s speed? Well, it’s easy, Wp Rocket incorporates the latest features in terms of performance, such as lazy loading images, compression and differ java script. Wp Rocket also provides users that browse on your website, with the fastest, cached version of your website’s page.
– Server location
A website might turn out to be slow because of its server. Let’s say that your law website’s server is in New Zealand and you’re visiting the website from Canada, the data will take longer to load for you than for someone that is found in Australia. To solve this, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This will connect users to the nearest server, therefore the content will load faster and the website speed will be improved as well. This is an expensive solution, but it is very effective in the long term.
– Server performance
There are 3 types of hosting and one of them is shared hosting. In this case, your website can be slow because you are sharing space and resources with millions of other websites. This will provide a poor server performance which will impact the overall performance of your website. Another type of hosting is Virtual Private Servers (VPS). In this case, your law firm will have its individual part of the virtual server. This is an excellent way to speed up your website.
– Too many plugins
The more the plugins, the more the file requests, and the longer it takes to load. Obviously, you don’t want your law firm website to be slow and have security issues so check all your plugins and keep only the necessary ones and update them regularly. To do so you can run some tests to check which plugins are slowing down your website as, apart from the number of plugins used, their quality also impacts the speed of your website.
– Lots of traffic
The more users try to visit your website, the slower it loads. It’s like when going shopping and there are discounts, you will encounter loads of people, thus the service will be slower than when the shop is empty. The same thing happens to your website. Even if you have a good server and it will try to keep up with all the traffic, it will still slow down somewhere. Try to use a website caching. Basically in this process you keep your current version on the hosting and until your website is updated and the users will be provided with this version of the website thus the speed of your website will be improved.
– An outdated CMS
Not keeping up to date with your software and plugins will slow down your website. So whenever you see a pop-up telling you to update your software click on it. In this way, you will get rid of any problems and at the same time, your website will be quicker. To increase your website’s performance, run a database optimization.
Right now we have answered the first two points, so let’s continue.
One of the first things you should do is check your current loading time and what is slowing down your website. Now, we know what slows down our website and how we can improve it so the only thing to do is to assess our website speed. There are different ways of assessing the speed of your website, such as through Google Pagespeed Insight, Pingdom, Yslow, Cloudflare, and WebPageTest.
So, after all these points, why is it important to have a high-performance website?
➢ Having a slow website kills conversations and you might lose half of your visitors if the page takes longer than 4-5 seconds to load, thus you will lose a big market segment as today’s generation has less patience. Therefore, to avoid losing users you will need to use the above solutions to generate a higher performance.
➢ If you have a fast website users might consider it more professional and reliable and thus turn to you instead of competitors. A fast website provides the users with an extraordinary experience which will then lead to relationships between users and lawyers.
➢ Speed doesn’t only impact the users and their experiences, but even the rankings that the website gets. High rankings lead to more organic traffic which will increase the popularity of your website.
In conclusion, as you can see the speed of your website is a very important factor for your law firm. So if you want to have a successful website you need to check your speed and what factors are slowing down your website, thus affecting negatively, and fix them. Regularly check and evaluate your website’s speed and success in order to retain and attract more users.