Is your website the tortoise or the hare?

Our attention spans are getting shorter by the day.

That’s why website speed is an important consideration for digital marketers like me (and like you!).

Google performed a study about the impact of slow load times on mobile, and the results are super interesting.

• When a webpage loaded in 3 seconds (vs. 1 second), the likelihood someone left the site before interacting with it increased 32%.
• When a webpage loaded in 6 seconds (vs. 1 seconds), the likelihood someone left the site before interacting with it increased 106%.

Read more about the study here.​

This tells me that churches & schools need to be ensuring their sites load lickety-split in order to increase the chances that a visitor sticks around to learn about the significance of what you have to offer.

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The #1 culprit of a website that loads slowly is large image files.

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Especially if you’ve had professional pictures shot, the images on your site probably have gigantic file sizes. This causes a heavy lift on bandwidth.

There are tools you can use to compress these files.

These tools work by rewriting the file without a loss in image quality. Then, they spit out a smaller file.

For instance: If you could store 100 original images on a flash drive before, now you could store 150 compressed images.

Here’s my go-to image compressor

Take a few minutes to find some images that are on your site, compress them, and re-upload. You’re likely to see a significant improvement in the speed of your site!