Imagine visiting a website that takes more than 10, no two seconds to load. We know that the mouse is going to hover to the top right corner because honestly, no one has the time to wait nowadays.
A Forbes article mentioned that a mere one-second delay in page load time means a seven percent decline in sales, 11%[1] fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a seven percent loss in conversions.
Your website may be a work of art with awesome features. It can have lightning speed chat responses but with slow loading time, none of that matters.
Attention spans are growing smaller and patience is thinner than ever. Other than that, slow loading sites impact[2] your SEO because it affects how Google sees your page. Speed is a ranking factor[3] Google uses to measure your page. Sure, content may be king, but speed can change how your content performs in search.
We’ll dig deep and find the silent killers of loading time – both common and uncommon causes.
1. Uncompressed images and bizarre image dimensions
The quality and size of an image affects its loading time. Having a high-resolution image on every page means your site will load slower.
How you can fix this
A couple of ways we found included installing plugins. The first one is with a jQuery Lazy Load plugin. This plugin allows the images that are only appearing to load “above the fold” or on a part a visitor is currently viewing.
The second option is by using image optimizers such as Yahoo!’s Smush.it or use the WP Smush.it plugin which compacts images without altering their quality. With the WP plugin, it can be done automatically when you add graphics to your