Speed optimization: an actionable guide for business owners

Learn how speed impacts your business and get practical tips for making your website faster.

Google has been saying that speed matters since 2009. Ten years on, and it matters more than ever as website speed went from being a competitive advantage over other sites in the same industry, to a standard experience expected by the everyday user that could make or break the conversion rate.

Fortunately, making your website load fast is not that difficult. At least, most of the time.

Solutions in the form of speed testing and monitoring tools, site plugins that automate optimization, and several other technologies and techniques are plenty and readily available.

Some speed optimization tricks don’t even require tools, just awareness and action. But where do you start?

In this series, we explore different topics to help you get started on speeding up your website—or if you’re already past the “beginner” stage, to help you keep the process going.

Note, however, that this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of every single thing you need to know about speed optimization.

For example, while we briefly run through them, we don’t delve too deeply into very technical steps that a person who doesn’t know how to code will be able to do. This is a guide for the typical business owner who wants to take action on the speed of their website, and wants to learn how to do it.

That said, no matter what stage you’re in—whether you’re just taking the first step or at the point where you’ve done the basics and ready to take it further—here are resources for you to:

• Understand how your website speed is affecting your business.
• Learn the important terms and concepts about speed optimization, explained in a non-technical fashion.
• Know the different factors that could be slowing down your site and explore different steps (ranging from simple to a bit more complex) that you can take to speed up.

This series was last updated on July 17, 2019. Best practices on speed optimization are constantly changing, and while we’ll do our best to keep the information here accurate, consider them as current only for the date of the last revision.