There are a lot of moving parts in a successful chiropractic website, but one of the key factors in PageSpeed, or how fast your site loads for patients.
Google prioritizes sites in the search ranking based upon the usefulness of the site to users and the quality of the experience people have with a site. If people have a bad experience with your website content or structure, they won't stick around for long. They won't click through to other pages. They won't watch chiropractic videos on your site.
One of the worst things you can do is have a site that loads very slowly. I'm sure that you've had this experience: you go to visit a site, but it takes so long to load that you simply hit the back button and find another website. Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and we simply won't wait more than a few seconds for a website to load for us.
What Determines PageSpeed?
There are many things that can cause a site to load slowly:
- A slow web server. This is a common problem, as many web hosting services used shared accounts, which means that there are literally hundreds or thousands of sites on the same server that your site lives on. This can dramatically reduce your page loading times.
- Wordpress. Wordpress is one of the most popular website platforms used today and many chiropractic websites are using the content management platform. The problem is that if you use a lot of plugins or a complex theme, your PageSpeed can be very poor. We don't recommend WordPress for your chiropractic website, for a number of reasons, but if you are using it, make sure that it's configured properly and optimized for speed.
- Improperly coded website. Websites look pretty simple on the surface, but there's a lot of code that runs your website and it needs to be set up properly and efficiently. At ChiroHosting, we built our own content management platform for both security and PageSpeed.
- Improperly optimized images. When you add a photo to your website, you'll want to make sure to resize it and optimize it to make it look good but take up less memory. A properly optimized image can cut load times by 90%. At ChiroHosting, we provide you with a stock image library of images that are already optimized. Our support staff will help you optimize your personal images to make sure that your site loads quickly.
How do I check my PageSpeed?
Google makes it easy to check your website's PageSpeed. Just go here and enter your website address.
What does a fast website look like?
Here's one of our client websites: Gray Chiropractic Health, and here's the mobile PageSpeed results from Google:
And here are the results for the desktop version of the site that Google retrieved:
As you can see this site is getting 92/100 on mobile and 94/100 on desktop. Mobile results are critical, as we're finding that more and more traffic to our client websites is coming from phones and tablets. Also, Google is prioritizing mobile-ready websites, so it's important to make sure that your site is responsive and optimized for these devices.
Need a boost?
If you would like to modernize your website and take advantage of our great chiropractic content, check out our example websites and give one of our experts a call today at (800) 295-3346. We'll be happy to help you build a fantastic web presence for your practice!
