People have short attention spans. In an article published in 2015 from Time, they state: “Microsoft found that since the year 2000 (or about when the mobile revolution began) the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds.” (You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish.)

8 seconds is pretty generous in 2020.

In fact, most people don’t even read paragraphs anymore, they just read the first line of text to get a gist of the content. (If they even read past the headline.) Which means we have a great opportunity as marketers to optimize the experience of our websites for everyone.

Part of that means changing the way you write – adding more white space and getting directly to the point.

Another part of that is making sure that your site loads as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Here are three tips to optimize the speed of your website:

1. Make sure your images are compressed, making the file size smaller. Smaller image file sizes load more quickly.

I like to compress my images with ILoveImg.Com. It’s free and easy to use. You simply drop in the image you want to compress and it automatically does the work for you. Most of the time you should try to get your images as small a file size as possible. Yes, this can distort the image slightly, but most of the time it’s not noticeable for end-users. (They might notice if they zoom in on the image…but hey! Who’s got any time for that!?) Image files in the GB and MB range are more for print-quality needs. You should try to get your website images down to the KB range.

2. Choose your images wisely, and keep only the ones that enhance your posts. Images are fantastic. They engage readers and can help you paint a more compelling picture, emotionally connect with your audience. However, they can also bog down your site load speed. So, make sure that you keep images to only the most compelling, enhancing choices as possible. (Neil Patel agrees with this and gives some other awesome tips: How to Make Your Mobile Site Load Faster (link opens in a new tab!))

3. Embed your videos using an external site like YouTube rather than hosting the content on your own site. This allows you to stream the content for your users rather than having all the code directly on your page. (Want to know more? Do Videos Impact Your Website’s Load Time? (link opens in a new tab!)) Most websites, like WordPress sites, make it easy to embed videos from external video players. They even have a content block option for YouTube videos, which means that embedding your video is as easy as uploading it to YouTube, then copying and pasting a link!

When you optimize your site for load speed, you’ll lower your bounce rate because you’ll be enhancing your user’s experience. Always keep the end user in mind when creating sites, first and foremost, and the SEO will follow.

If you enjoyed this post, please be sure to like it and drop me a comment if you have any questions or additions!

Thanks for reading!