Today’s modern society is so used to instant gratification. We can walk into our neighborhood Starbucks and have our white mocha latte sitting for us, hot and ready on the counter if we pre-order on their app. Amazon now offers same day delivery, and we can click a button and receive our item delivered to our doorstep within hours. With that mentality comes a society with little patience for waiting.

How often have you visited a website only to be greeted by a long loading time, and then ultimately abandoned the page and went somewhere else? You aren’t alone. This chart below shows page abandonment based on page loading time. As you can see from the graph, each second your page is slow to load you are losing potential visitors, leads, clients, customers, etc.

If you own a website, I highly encourage to run a few simple tests to see where your site stands. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a great place to start. Simply enter your sites URL, and press analyze. You’ll be given a score for the mobile analysis as well as desktop, in addition to some suggestions for how to improve it. Pingdom also offers a great tool to show you page loading sites and other suggestions to improve it.

Here are some quick and easy ways to increase your site speed and score. Use a tool like Compressior.io to reduce image file sizes without sacrificing quality, and if you’re using WordPress as a CMS you can minify JS and CSS using the Autoptimize plugin. Many web hosts have the option of adding a CDN for an additional fee or you can use a 3^rd party service which will cache your site and improve it’s performance. WordPress also has plenty of plugins in its repository to assist in caching. If after implementing these changes you’re still seeing poor scores and slow loading times it’s time to get down to the source and make sure the hosting your using is up to par. For some database intensive sites a simple shared hosting plan may not be enough, and a VPN or Dedicated Server may be required.

Ultimately, you want to make sure that you’re not losing customers before they can even walk in the door due to a slow site. Not only will increasing your page speed increase customer retention and lower your bounce rate – but it subsequently also improves your SEO so it’s a win-win all around!