Website Speed and Performance Impact User Behavior

An established personal injury firm contacted Envoca with a WordPress website that was lacking in performance. 

We provided:

• A technical audit to identify issues and recommendations
• Website updates including migration to a quality host provider 
• Fixes to on-page technical errors that were slowing down load time

Load time is important to the user experience. A website’s bounce rate increases as its page speed decreases. In other words, the slower a page’s load time is, the more people only visit one page, which reduces conversions and impacts SEO. 

Our team successfully migrated the law firm’s website, a move we typically recommend when it can decrease load times by 25 percent or more with a platform upgrade. In this case, we simultaneously fixed coding errors, which decreased the load time by 88 percent—nearly a 20-second reduction!

To improve the website’s mobile performance, we added CDN and removed the load icon that was part of the old template, changing it to a “lazy load,” which loads the top of the page elements first (what visitors immediately see) with a staggered entry of the page. We made further on-page optimization improvements, such as image optimizations, which decreased load time by an additional six seconds.

Hosting platforms range in the speed and security they offer. Choosing a host is foundational in maintaining strong SEO health. By increasing site performance, we were able to provide our client with a better user experience, ensuring visitors can find the information they need and stay on the site long enough to learn about their company.