My long-time WP Minder client BedTimes Magazine came to me with a quandary – their newly-redesigned website was very slowly. Could I help? Of course I could. Looking for the low-hanging fruit, I made some performance tweaks designed to get the best load time reduction with the least input per my client’s request. While there were many third-party scripts in play on the site, which we couldn’t do anything about, there were definitely areas I could improve fairly easily. We wound up with a load time reduction of about 58% – it’s not the fastest site, but the goal of… Continue Reading
Website Performance
Weekly Links Roundup – Lazy Loading, Tracking Downloads, Page Speed, Email Marketing for Bloggers
The top website and online marketing links of the week. Here’s an easy performance win – implement lazy loading on your site. Lazy loading means not loading images that are off-screen; they eventually load when the user scrolls down to them. Learn more about lazy loading and here’s the plugin I like for this task in WordPress sites. If you offer white papers or other kinds of downloads on your site, did you know that you can use Google Analytics, which you’re most likely already using, to track downloads? Though GA doesn’t natively track this kind of interaction, you can… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Site Speed, Product Pages, Contact Pages, WordPress Security Myths
The top website and online marketing links of the week. You know your website is slow. It’s always been like that. But do you really understand what that slow site could be costing you in terms of customers and conversions? A recent report shows that 70% of buyers are influence by a site’s page loading time. The average site loads in about 15 seconds – but a number of studies show that the majority of online shoppers will leave a site if they have to wait more than 3 seconds. If you need help making your site faster, check out… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Slow Sites, Black Friday, Improving Conversions, Google Reviews, Blogging
The top website and online marketing links of the week. Think your slow-as-a-turtle website isn’t hurting your business? Think again. Google has been looking at page load time since back in 2010, and they use this information when ranking websites. A study from 2016 showed that over 50% of mobile users would abandon a site if it took more than 3 seconds to load. Do you think they’ve gotten more patient since then? Nope. Learn how a slow site impacts your business. And then take a look at our performance optimization service. We can help you stop frustrating your users!… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Slow WordPress Dashboard, Facebook Marketing, SEO Problems, Trust
The top website and marketing links of the week. If you find that your WordPress admin dashboard is suddenly running a lot slower – guess what? It’s probably that plugin you installed recently. This post on 14 ways to fix a slow WordPress admin includes a list of 35 plugins known to cause dashboard slowdowns, but in case that’s not your issue, there are other things you can troubleshoot and this post will help you do just that. If you’re using Facebook to connect to your audience, here’s a big post detailing 22 Facebook marketing tips for budget-minded small businesses…. Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Optimize Images, Seasonal Marketing, Dark Patterns, SEO Tools
The top website and marketing links of the week. “Optimize images” is almost always one of the recommendations when testing a slow-loading website. Optimizing means making images no larger (dimensions and resolution) that they need to be for your site to reduce loading time. It also has to do with making them findable in search engine results. Here’s a nice guide to image optimization, not too technical, that can help you get your own site loading faster. If you run a seasonal business, marketing can be tough. Here’s a post from Constant Contact with 3 easy steps to year-round marketing… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress Performance, Marketing Plan, Text on Images, Email Lists
The top website and marketing links of the week. WordPress performance can be a hard thing to get your head around – there are a lot of factors that play into page loading time. If you’re willing to try to tackle a slow-loading site on your own, this checklist of 19 ways to speed up WordPress may help. Are you a freelancer or solo entrepreneur? If you are, you have to be your own marketing team (as well as wearing every other hat) and mastering your marketing may seem like an impossibility. Here’s a nice post that describes a simple,… Continue Reading
Weekly Links Roundup – Mobile Design, Plugins, Web Fonts, HTTPS
The top website and marketing links of the week. It’s common for clients to make assumptions about mobile design (users never scroll; I have to cut back on content for phones). But many of them just aren’t true! Learn about mobile design myths and how to go beyond them to provide a truly useful and enjoyable experience for phone users. Is there such a thing as too many WordPress plugins? Maybe… I’ve seen as many as 35 on a single website, and IMO that’s a bit much… but it really depends on the plugins themselves. You can have one badly-built… Continue Reading