A website’s social media accounts are as important as their websites. These platforms allow you to connect with your target audience and build a sense of community. You can also post updates about new products, improvements to your services, promos, and more.
Search engines may also check a website for connected social media accounts for ranking. If your website is connected to a verified social media profile, your rank can shoot up. That said, social media traffic is also important for SEO.
Adding your website link to your social media profiles is good practice. Likewise, you should add links to your social media profiles on your website.
That will allow you to send visitors to channels that will allow them to know you better. However, this becomes less effective if your website is slow.
Here, we will discuss how slow website loading times affect your social media traffic. On top of that, we’ll give you tips on how to speed up your website.
How to send your website visitors to Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), or other social media profiles? They have to stay on your website long enough to find the links.
The thing is that these links are often at the bottom of a web page or on your Contact page.
Now, let’s say a person has visited your website. However, your website did not fully load in five seconds. In an era of short attention spans, this can be detrimental to your business.
The visitor will leave your website to look for other websites that offer similar services or products. As such, they will not see your social media links.
But your social media traffic is not the only thing that will be affected. Visitors leaving too quickly increases the bounce rate.
When search engines see this, they will think your website should not be recommended since it does not offer a good user experience. Therefore, your online visibility as a whole will be impacted. It is not good for SEO.
That’s not all! If visitors quickly leave your website, it means there are no sales. Your website’s purpose is to drive sales, and you are spending resources to keep it running. That means you are not earning money, and in fact, you are losing some.
With that said, you should improve the speed of your website.
Several elements in your website affect its speed and performance. Updating these elements can lead to big improvements.
The website hosting service that you choose has the biggest impact on website speed. If the server itself is not built to provide good website performance, it does not matter if your images and codes are optimized.
Shared hosting is more affordable than the other options. But it’s not the best choice for performance and security. On the other hand, getting your own server ensures your website will load fast. However, it is expensive.
Meanwhile, reliable virtual private server hosting is always a good choice. Compared to shared hosting, it offers better speed, website performance, and security. When it comes to costs, it is cheaper than private hosting.
A web page that has too many assets will load slower than a web page with just a few ones. That is because the user’s browser has to send an HTTP request for each of them. The more requests to be sent, the longer it will take.
That said, you should not overload your pages with images, CSS, and JavaScript. That is especially true for your Home page, as it is the first page that most of your visitors will see.
Besides the quantity, the quality and size of your images can also slow down your website.
Large images take up a lot of bandwidth, which, in turn, increases the website’s loading time. Thus, you should compress your images. The file size you want to target is around 100 KB.
Remember to choose reliable image compressors so that not much image quality will be sacrificed.
You should also scale your images. While browsers can do it automatically, one less job for them to do means faster loading time for your website.
As for the image format, JPG, PNG, and WEBP are excellent options.
The code is the building block of your website. If there are problems with your code, there will be problems with your website. So, revisit it to tidy it up.
You should remove redundant and dead code. Furthermore, you should consider removing lines that don’t affect the website’s functionality. These include comments, line breaks, and blank spaces. Shortening your variable names could also help.
Minifying your code may take a long time, so you may want to use a software program to do that. But please have a web developer review the minified code before using it.
With these SEO strategies, you will be able to decrease the loading time of your website and improve the user experience.
How does website speed impact social media traffic and SEO rankings? Slow loading times increase the bounce rate, which hurts the ranking of your website. The visitors who also left quickly did not get a chance to see your social media links. Thus, your social media traffic is also affected.
That said, you should optimize your website so it loads fast. Some steps you could take include minifying your code or compressing your images.
For best results, we recommend you partner with an seo agency like Alexanders Digital Marketing. The experts in the team will analyze your website and create effective strategies for improving your speed and SEO. With years of experience behind the team, you can rest assured that improvements will come in no time.
