Your Website Must Be Faster €“ Right Now

If you haven’t yet checked your website’s speed at Google’s PageSpeed Insights, stop now and click the link. It only takes a minute, and your business depends on it.

All done? Good job. Here’s why we asked you to do that.

Page speed is already quite significant to how your funeral home website gets ranked in organic search. But this metric is about to become imperative.

With people now researching funeral, burial and cremation services more on mobile devices than on desktop computers, Google is putting far more emphasis on the mobile experience.

That’s the rationale behind its mobile-first index, which means how your website displays and works on mobile is prioritized over how it displays and works on the desktop.

In July, Google will make page speed—how quickly content loads when someone visits your website—a critical factor in how it ranks your site. If your page speed is too low, your website is in deep trouble.

This is particularly a key concern for independent funeral homes, for a couple of reasons:

1. At the risk of being blunt, quite a few independent funeral home websites remain archaic in 2018. They were developed many years ago and haven’t had any significant technical upgrades since then.
2. Some independent funeral homes have outsourced website creation in recent years, but even though page speed remains poor on these sites, the firms that developed them won’t act to increase speed—and the firm is under no obligation to do so.

That’s why this is a big problem for independent funeral homes. If your website hasn’t been optimized for mobile or page speed, much less both, you need to have that rectified immediately.

If you paid an outside firm to develop your site and still don’t have sufficient page speed, you need to contact that firm ASAP. Some of these firms, unfortunately, are unethical. They won’t act to fix the problem—it’s just more work for them, and they got paid already. In a situation like that, you need to contract with an expert to get your mobile/page speed optimization up to snuff.

It’s really that important. Because even if page speed were not important to Google, it definitely is to today’s users.

Slow website speed kills conversions. According to a survey by Kissmetrics, about half of visitors now expect website content to load in two seconds or less. More than 40 percent of visitors will abandon a website if the content takes more than three seconds to load.

So now you know you need to act fast on page speed for your funeral home website to be successful. What do you do first?

You can’t fix a problem until you know exactly what it is, so click the following link for Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This free tool will determine your site’s page speed and provide recommendations on how to improve it.

Once you have that information, take it to your webmaster/site developer. You want strong speed and optimization scores for both mobile and desktop.

If they’re not willing to help you with that, consult with a knowledgeable, reputable online marketing firm for help. This is a speed problem that needs to be handled with the utmost, well, speed!

(NOTE: All the traffic in the world doesn’t help if your website doesn’t efficiently convert visitors into clientele. Test your site with our free Website Analyzer now and learn how to improve conversion rates.)