So Why Not Just Add In A Speed Plugin?

In most cases this can help in the short-term. The thing is, these plugins are only as good as the instructions they’re given. If you’re comfortable dealing with minified CSS and deferring Javascript execution, work away! Even if you do understand those things, do you have the time to work out what your site needs?

Also, did we mention that there’s no single plugin that will do everything a site needs better than specific optimisation practices? This means you’ll need more than one plugin to get the best results. More plugins = more opportunities for things to break!

Isn’t speed dictated by a hosting provider though?

Yes and no. It depends! Generally, your hosting quality and chosen package (if available) will have an impact on the speed of your website. While it is one of many factors in the mix, unfortunately it’s not the biggest one. If you have hosting on servers that are optimised for the type of platform (e.g. WordPress) and operate a ‘shared-load’ server environment (plus a few other helpful bits), then you’ve done all you can from the hosting side of things.

Those of you that have hosting with Get That Website Online are fully covered and then some!

What if the site was only recently built?

Even recently built sites might need tweaking. It will largely depend on the quality of the build and whether your developer or designer cut any corners anywhere with optimisation or build. There are so many different factors to think about, and with the proliferation of ‘free’ website builder tech (HUGE warning flag about those), speed and performance is not guaranteed.

Your developer or designer may very well be amazing and have done everything brilliantly, but websites don’t stay static for long. Things get updated, moved around, added to. The platform, theme and plugins will also have updates that mean things change at least monthly, which can affect your site’s speed and performance.

If speed and performance are crucial to your site fulfilling its role in your business (any kind of lead generation or online sales for example), ideally you will be checking each page every month with a performance testing tool (for both mobile and desktop) to stay on top of things.

Built By/Hosted With/Got A Maintenance Plan With Us Already?

Well first up, your site will have been optimised during the build, so you’re already ahead of the game! However, if we find anything during the Audit that should have been taken care of during the original build, we’ll fix it for free. Plus, if you ask us to make any fixes that aren’t connected to the original build we’ll discount the Audit cost against that invoice too

Your hosting service will be on the right servers for the type of site you have (we mainly deal with WordPress but can handle Linux too), but if we didn’t build your site, then we won’t have knowledge of how it was constructed and whether it was properly optimised by the original developer or designer.

Our Maintenance Plans cover either Basic Maintenance which is all about ensuring all the moving parts are up to date and working as they should, or Maintenance Plus which is about also making tweaks to content for you during any given month. Many of you already know how responsive we are for both this and if things break! We don’t charge much for this service as it is more about getting something done regularly to take it off your to-do list.

Speed and Performance testing and maintenance is a separate service that ensures things look and work the way they should in lightning fast time, providing an amazing end user experience. It requires a higher skill base than for our other services and is more labour-intensive and demanding than the Maintenance services, so stands alone as a separate offering.

What About The Free Audit Services Out There?

It’s true, there are companies offering to provide a ‘speed report’ for free… I think you know what’s coming! These services are supplied as a ‘Lead Magnet’ for the companies concerned, where they’re more interested in getting your email address so they can upsell you to another service.

While you may get some value from these things, you definitely won’t get a full report with an easy-to-understand layout and explanations that we offer, or the transparent quote for fixing any issues.

Does your website load pretty quickly already?

You might have loaded up your own website recently on your browser – maybe you visit it quite often – and you think it loads pretty quickly. So why would you need a speed and performance audit?

There are a few reasons why your own website might load up quickly: if you looked on the browser you usually use for everyday internet, there’s a very good chance that browser has shown you a ‘saved’ version of the site instead of getting the latest version ‘live’ from your hosting. This is known as caching, which is designed to save you time. This is great, except… Not all your visitors will have either visited your site before or even have brilliant internet connection.

Poor internet means even a slightly slow site will take an age to load (typically can mobile devices also exacerbate any issues) and people will not wait! Also, Google will test your website on what it calls a ‘throttled’ connection (it mimics poor connection speeds) and if you don’t do well there, this will impact their ranking of your site.

What if your site comes out with top scores?

Congratulations! If this is the case and there’s literally nothing more that needs doing, we’ll refund you the cost of the Audit – win/win for you!