[00:00:00] James Breese: Strength Matters Media. Video. Print. Podcasts.
[00:00:06] Josh Kennedy: Today we're talking about page speed. What is it and why gym owners should care? James, I'm sure you've probably going to throw some few stats at me. So what is page speed? Why
[00:00:17] James Breese: should gym owners care? Well, let's think about this now. If somebody lands on their website, as an example, and the page takes over three seconds to load.
[00:00:29] And by the way, three seconds is an eternity. Over half the users will click off that website. So we think about in terms of why we should care was we want people to land in our website and stick around to fight, find out more information, engage with us as a, as a business, try and like connect with them and try and capture their details, but if we're losing over half of them when they land on the page and it's so slow.
[00:00:56] Well, we're basically fighting with our hands tied behind our [00:01:00] back from the, from the very start. So it's important to understand that faster pages are more efficient and provide a better user experience for everybody involved, which then therefore means that Google will rank you higher up the charts on the ranking systems to help you find and get more clients and patients that way.
[00:01:17] So gym owners, it is so important to have fast loading websites. However. Most of them, guess what, don't have fast loading websites. And the way you can check this is by going to Google page speed insights, putting your URL into that, uh, little testing link, and it'll come up with you straight away, telling you how fast your website is on the mobile side and the desktop side.
[00:01:42] And remember, we've got to optimize for mobile first, and then we've got to optimize desktop because most people are searching via mobile first means, most webgen
[00:01:52] Josh Kennedy: What kind of stats are we looking for, James? What kind of stats are we looking for?
[00:01:57] James Breese: Yeah. So stats literally looking for [00:02:00] over 90 percent on both mobile and desktop.
[00:02:02] Like you have no excuse now or website developers, you have no excuse with technology available to us to have a website loaded a hundred percent for desktop and over 90 percent for mobile with a bit of clever tweaking and doing that. If you have got a website being built by somebody and it's not as fast as that.
[00:02:20] Then I would say, start questioning your website developer and builder. Cause you then probably not as good as what you think they are. If I'm just calling them out there and then right now, in terms of you're going to combine SEO tactics and with website design too. So how,
[00:02:34] Josh Kennedy: how do you then in the simplest terms, if you can keep it simple, get a good page speed, is it about the amount of pictures you've got?
[00:02:43] So the, the banners videos, do those sort of things come into it?
[00:02:46] James Breese: Yeah, it's as simple, as simple as it is. I would remove most videos from your website. So a lot of, a lot of gym owners have a banner behind their, like, what they call the hero section. And it says, this is, you know, [00:03:00] showing people what's going on behind the scenes.
[00:03:01] Now, most of the time, people don't, with these banner videos, there's so much going on that you lose the message of what it's about. You can't see anything. Your eyes just go all funny. So that's the first problem. But the second problem, it takes ages to load. Most people just upload a video and it takes ages.
[00:03:15] It takes up to 12 seconds on some people. So it's actually detrimental to the effect of what you're trying to do. So very quickly check the videos on your website. If there's too much, there's too heavy, take them off because it's, you need to be faster. It's all about the experience. Simple is better. And also check your images.
[00:03:31] Sometimes people are uploading images. that are high res, like taken with a professional camera of like 15, 20, 40 plus megabytes, right? That's a lot of load time. So you need to reduce them to be able to get onto that website so they load faster. Now, if you're using WordPress, that help you do it. But before you even upload it to the website, you've got to reduce those images first and foremost.
[00:03:53] To get them up there here. So just that's the quickest and easiest way to do it is to reduce video size or reduce videos [00:04:00] and reduce image sizes on there too. Now just loads, actually, while we're talking, I just found another, another incredible stat here, which talks about slow page, slow page load times, which increase bounce rate.
[00:04:11] Now bounce rate is all about when people jump off your page, they land on your page and go off it straight away without doing anything else. So if your page load time is one to three seconds. You have a bounce rate of about 32%. That's a lot. That's a lot of bounce rate, right? There's still 1 to 3 seconds.
[00:04:28] 1 to 5 seconds, it's 90 percent of people will bounce. 1 to 5, 3, 1 to 5 seconds. If it's 1 to 6 seconds, 106 percent of people will, will be bouncing off percentage. If it's over 6 seconds and more, about 10 seconds, you're talking 123 percent bounce rate, which is incredible, which is like more than double.
[00:04:50] Everyone coming onto your web page, like bouncing off it. So just knowing that is important just to make sure people will want to engage with the content you [00:05:00] have. So you can write the best blog post. You can write the best website copy, but if it's too slow to load, guess what? No one cares. No one cares.
[00:05:09] And that's the same as Google. Google cares because it wants a better experience. So page speed is so important. So important. What difference does it make on Google? Well, Google wants to rank the best websites higher, that have the better user experience. It's all about user experience for them. They want to help us get our answers faster, help us find what we're looking for faster.
[00:05:33] So therefore, people with faster websites It's all part of the user experience. So it helps you in the ranking system, not just in your terms of looking for services by you, but it may be your blog content or other content you're trying to share with people. So they're trying to find all that too. So it is so important.
[00:05:49] Josh Kennedy: So it's kind of a double whammy if you've got a slow page, right? You not only will you, people bounce off your website in the first place, cause they won't, you know, be bothered to stick around for it to load. You [00:06:00] won't rank as high on Google either. So. You also lose cost potential customers and clients.
[00:06:04] James Breese: Exactly. So it's, you know, it's, it's incredible like in terms of that. So yes, gym owners should care. They should look at their website, go to pay Google page speed insights, type that into Google, you'll find it straight away, put it into it, and you will come up with a score. And the score will most likely horrify you to begin with.
[00:06:22] What we're seeing most of the time is about 20 30%. And if it's 20 30%, it means that if I wanted to come and open up a gym in your area, I can guarantee you that I'd rank higher in less than 6 months than you guys if I did everything correctly. So what you want to try and do is increase your page speed to prevent any competitors from ranking higher than you.
[00:06:41] That's where we're trying to get it. There we go. Andrew,
[00:06:43] Josh Kennedy: I know this isn't exactly your area of expertise, but I don't want to let go a whole podcast episode with you just sat there and not contributing. So any thoughts before we wrap up?
[00:06:51] Andrew Wallis: No, I was, I was just thinking as James was, um, so eloquently putting out that about the, the, the importance of PageSpeed and I [00:07:00] was thinking about my own website in that, um, it used to work well.
[00:07:04] But it's gone, it's gone down and it scores poorly when I put it into, uh, the Google page speeds, but equally as well as thinking, uh, and that's down to, I think with the host for one thing as well, uh, picking the right, uh, web host will play its part as well. But. As James says, we've found through time and time again that when somebody's coming to us asking about, um, generating more leads for their business and we're looking at and we do an audit of their websites, um, it's a bit of an eye opener to the, to the, to the client that how, how badly, uh, their, their website is doing, uh, particularly on, on, on mobile.
[00:07:48] And when James was mentioning about the video, for example, I was thinking, yeah, Pees me off, no end when you're looking on your mobile and you're trying to make out what, what's happening in the, in the video [00:08:00] behind that. The hero image as well. So it's just making sure you've got all the elements in play and you've got it optimized accordingly to give you the best possible, possible chance in being found initially.
[00:08:13] That's the first part
[00:08:15] James Breese: and again, just, just to go back to helping people being useful to help people do this and get the fastest so. Definitely the first and easiest and biggest non technical tip is to reduce images and reduce video on the homepages. The second, which is a bit, a little bit more technical, but I think it's still doable, which we highly encourage is using something called the content delivery network.
[00:08:37] Now, what that means, it's a way of allowing people around the world to collectively use servers, okay. To help your website be found. So for example, say you're serving everybody around the world for your business. So, but if the server is in America. Where your customers are in the UK searching for you, it's going to be slow with load up.
[00:08:58] So something like [00:09:00] Cloudflare, which I highly recommend everyone getting there. Website onto is going to help them what we call cash, save a stored version of the website, uh, locally to get them to, to load faster here. I know it's quite technical, but it makes your website load faster around the world basically.
[00:09:17] And it's free. Essentially it's, it's free, unless you want to pay for higher end services, which are trying to get into that's the lead generation magnet for themselves. But you can set it up, go to cloudflare. com, set up your account, copy some things over back and forth from where you hosted domain. And within 20 minutes, you pretty much will be hosted on here and you'll make a website faster into Google's terms too.
[00:09:39] Now, obviously that is a little bit more technical. Again, I'll caveat with all of this sort of stuff, guys, you know, we're here to help. We are here to help. We know. The technical terms and this, this side inside out website speed is our thing, right? It really is. And how we do things. So if you're going to take your, take your website for a test, speed test, let us know how you get on [00:10:00] if it's slow and you want some help in understanding it.
[00:10:02] Well, book in for a free strategy call with us and we'll help you understand it better. That's, this is what we do. This is my, this is my gift to the world of health and fitness is websites and making them quick and making them get found. So I'm more than happy to chat with you over a call to share. Hey.
[00:10:16] A couple of tips on what you can do, or if you want us to help you do it ourselves, we can do that too. So in terms of our website design services. So have a think about that.
[00:10:25] Josh Kennedy: As you say, James, you are the geek. This is your thing indeed. Um, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe.
[00:10:32] And as James was saying, if you do want help getting more clients and also about your page speed, of course, that's what we're all about, then book in for your free 15 minute strategy call with us. Go to strengthmanners. com forward slash strategy.