In today’s digital landscape, the speed of a website plays a crucial role in user experience and search engine optimization, and Wix websites are no exception. The faster your website, the more conversions and sales you will have. This article will provide valuable strategies for improving the loading time and overall efficiency of Wix websites.
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How to diagnose speed issues
There are several ways to diagnose speed issues with your website. You can use the integrated wix page speed analytics. They give you a good picture about how fast your website is, but they lack any actionable insights that you can implement.
Using Wix Insights
Click on “Analytics & Reports” and then on Site Speed. It will bring you to the Wix Site Speed overview.
The Wix Site Speed overview gives you a rough sense of your Site Speed. It’s a good start to check on the health of your website. For more detailed analysis, it is best to check out Google Page Speed.
Using Google PageSpeed Insights
One reliable way to measure your Wix site performance is by using Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool provides valuable information on your website’s loading time and offers suggestions for improving performance. To use Google PageSpeed Insights:
- Visit the Google PageSpeed Insights website
- Enter your Wix site URL in the provided box
- Click “Analyze,” and wait for the results
Your website’s performance score will be displayed for both desktop and mobile versions. I consider these two fields the most important.
- The Treemap shows you all the apps you have installed
- The Opportunities show you all images which are way too big and need resizing.
The Treemap show you all apps that are installed
I have chosen a page which I know is performing very badly (I will not mention the name). The result from clicking on the treemap can be found here.
On the top right, you can see that every user has to download 5 Megabyte of Files from the website. This is huge (!!) and should ideally be around 1 Megabyte. The website users have to download Intercom, Hotjar, Facebook, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and so on. I would delete all of it. The user is suffering greatly from this bloat of third party apps.
What does this mean for you? Use the Treemap to see which third party apps are loaded and (please) delete as many as you can to ensure a great user experience.
The Image Opportunities show you problematic image
The image opportunities dropdown show you all images which are too big and which require resizing. You can convert them to webp format (wix does this automatically for you) and you can adjust their width and height (more on that below).
Images (and Videos) are one the main causes when it comes to website speed. Make resizing the images a priority and you will see great results.
1.) Remove all plugins you do not need
Wix comes with a set of pre-installed plugins. If you do not need them, delete them.
Click on Apps and then Manage apps. Delete all the apps that you do not need. Also delete all the pre-installed apps which are installed but not used in your website – they make your website slow, too.
Many websites also have several marketing apps installed. Click on “Marketing & SEO” and then click on “Marketing Integrations”. My take is that it is more important to have a fast loading website (and thus more conversions) than having perfect marketing attribution. I remove as many marketing apps as I can.
You should pay special attention to chat widgets. Sometimes, they ask for a custom image or avatar and website owners upload 2 Megabyte files for a chat icon. This makes the website very slow to load because the user has to (unnecessarily) download the 2 megabyte file (which could be a 30 KB file instead).
2.) Make plugins load last
In Wix, you can decide when plugins that you have installed will be loaded. Click on Settings and then scroll down until you see custom code. Click on it. Then move the plugins to the end of the body.
3.) Remove pages you do not need
If you have build many pages for your Wix website, delete the ones you do not strictly need anymore. This will speed up your website. Click on Site & App and then on Website. You might have built many pages over time, but you are not using them anymore and the are slowing down your website. Delete them.
4.) Images size to right format
Wix automatically resizes your images to *.webp format which is the recommended file format for images. This format is 30% lighter than *.png while keeping the same image quality. Additionally, you should also rightsize the images. For example, this image is shown as 200×300 pixels on the website, but its actual size is 2000×3000 pixels. This slows down your website – resize it (but make sure to not loose to much image quality).
5.) Do not include your image above the fold
“Above the fold” means everything that is visible when you load a page without scrolling. As a rule of thumb, do not include large images “above the fold”. When search engines estimate your site speed, they mostly look at site speed “above the fold”.
From the users point of view, the following is needed. Visitors often make quick judgments about the relevance of a website based on visible content, so prioritizing above-the-fold content may result in lower bounce rates and increased visitor retention. Some strategies to prioritize above-the-fold content include:
- Prioritizing key information and calls-to-action at the top of the page
- Reducing large images and heavy design elements above the fold to improve loading times
6) Use an seo-friendly theme
There are hundred of Wix templates out there. Most of them look great and most of them are terrible for SEO. As much as possible, use a recommended wix template and google “reddit + template name + for seo” to see what other users have to say about the template.
Wix Website Optimisation is an ongoing effort
If you implement these changes, you should see a drastic improvement in website speed and visitors to your website. Keep in mind that website optimisation is an ongoing effort that brings great results if done correctly.