When it comes to your website, speed is critical. Studies done recently show that if your website loads in more than 4 seconds the average visitor will click away to find another site. This ‘rebound’ effect is called your Bounce Rate, which Google tracks and factors into your search engine rankings. The higher your Bounce Rate, the larger your penalty.

First impressions are everything, and speed matters because people are generally impatient when they are searching online for the information they’re looking for. Especially when it comes to online buyers who are looking to make a purchase.

How To Test Your WordPress Website Speed

There are several free tools you can use to determine your present website load speed and identify the problem areas. The best free tool, in my opinion is GTMetrix.

All you need to do is visit their site and plug in your homepage url in the box and click the blue Test Your Site button. You’ll get a result similar to this:

You’ll also a detailed list and grade on each factor that determines your overall website load speed. That will look something like this:

Is Your Website Loading Slower Than 4 Seconds?

If so, you have two primary choices to make to fix the problem:

1. You could go through each section and fix each problem one at a time. This is both time consuming and technically challenging and there is no guarantee you will be able to break the 4 second threshold once your work is done.
2. You can simply switch to a better high-performance hosting platform. This is an easier and faster option and one that completely turned around my own website speed and rankings.

Cloudways lives and breathes WordPress. Their managed hosting for WordPress and WooCommerce takes away cloud server related hassles so you can scale your website the way you want.

Their Cutting-Edge Managed Web Hosting features include advanced caches coupled with Breeze, a simplified Cloudways cache and CloudwaysCDN for fast performance. They all come together to provide a seamless web hosting experience.

With Cloudways, you’ll be live in just minutes. Their cloud hosting platform takes away the complexities of setting up your website and allows you to go live in minutes.