Simple Site Speed Improvements for Local Businesses

Many small local businesseses have a hard time optimizing their site for speed. Why is that? Well, site speed optimizations tend to require web development skills which most small business owners don’t have, and developers can be quite expensive.

What can you do if you don’t have the skills or budget, but still need to improve your site’s speed? In this article, I’ll explain how you can make improvements to your site speed even if you don’t have access to a developer.

Why improve site speed?

User experience and conversion rates can be negatively affected if your site is slow. It’s very common that your potential customers browse their phones for local services while they are watching TV or while they are running errands. So mobile speed is super important for local business websites.

Mobile searches surpassed desktop searches in 2016. According to one study, 56% of mobile searches done on the go have local intent. And I’m sure that today, that number is much higher.

Compared to desktop devices, mobile devices have a much slower download speed. Because of that, websites that are already slower will have an even harder time loading quickly on a mobile device.

How does this affect local businesses? The average bounce rate for pages loading within two seconds is 9%. As soon as the page load time hits four seconds, the bounce rate soars. The bounce rate at five seconds is 38%. In a nutshell, a page’s load time directly impacts bounce rate.

This will in turn have a negative effect on conversion rates.

Wordpress site speed

Source: Cloudflare

Want to see how your site stacks up? You can check out site speed benchmarks from Google here.

How to improve site speed

Do you want visitors to leave your site or do you want your visitors to convert? I’m betting it’s the latter. So you need to optimize for speed, after all… MO’ SPEEDS = MO’ LEADS!

For this tutorial, I’m going to show you how I used a couple of different paid plugins on a local optometrist’s website. The price to use both of them starts at about $60. This will make it much easier for you to speed up your site. Also, I hit a few snags during the site speed improvement process on this site so I’ll show you how to overcome real problems that may arise.

Before making any speed optimizations make sure you are using a quality web host. There have been many times that a client’s site speed improved a ton just by switching hosting companies. If you are spending $5/mo on hosting, you may want to consider an upgrade.

Additionally, I do not recommend making site speed improvements on a live site. I recommend using a staging site because some of the settings you are going to mess with can cause what users are seeing to “break”.

A staging site is a copy of your live site. This allows you to try out plugins and edit code without affecting the live site.

Baseline metrics

Before getting started we need to take some baseline measurements so that we can see if the site speed improved after the optimizations were made. I use a few free third-party tools for this:

Google Pagespeed Insights�

Google Page Speed Insights

Google Pagespeed Insights gives you a speed score for mobile and lists specific site speed improvements you can make below the score.

Google Pagespeed Insights



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