Examples Of How Slow Page Loading Times Decrease Page Views

Site speed and website traffic are 2 of the most popular topics for WordPress users. Why? Because its proven that the slower your website/blog page’s load then the less page views and site visitors you get.

On the bright side of these facts are the positives.

Fast page loading times increase overall site speed resulting in an increase in page views for your site.

Here’s the figures from my own Google analytics site speed reports showing page views and page loading times

Big Fall In Page Loading Times

Significantly faster page loading times corresponds with a significant rise in page views on March 27th

Big Rise In Page Views

I experienced a big rise in page views after experiencing a big fall in page loading times on March 27th

Over the last few days i have experienced a problem with a file in my theme which caused the file to refresh itself from the server on each load, rather than using the cached copy.

This caused my site to take over 20 seconds to load which corresponded to a loss of traffic and fall in page views.

You can view the full forum posts if you wish on Woo themes support forum.

Here’s some of the Woo Themes Discussion

Hi Brad,

Thanks for your query. 🙂

While there isn’t a problem with the CSS file, that “ver” parameter looks to be a cache-busting addition, which is causing the file to refresh itself from the server on each load, rather than using the cached copy.

Do you have any cache-busting plugins active? If so, please deactivate them an advise of the issue persists.

If not, and the “ver” parameter is still present once all plugins have been deactivated, please post login details for your website in a “Private Post” on this thread, where I’ll debug the issue further.

On an additional note, we’d recommend using the W3 Total Cache plugin to cache and speed up your website. 🙂

Thanks and regards,
Matty.

I did change caching plugins from WP Super Cache to W3 Total Cache which didn’t fix the problem. It actually made it worse.

Caching Error Caused Pages to Load Slowly

On the 2nd April when i suffered the cache busting problem caused by a file conflicting with caching plugins. My average page loading times increased to over 27 seconds causing my page views to fall to 1635.

This was lower than the previous Monday where page views where above 2500 and the Monday prior to that where page views where above 2,000.

On this Monday i actually received less page views than on Sunday which is generally the lowest producing day.

Slow page Loading Times Decreased Page Views

The result of the slow page loading times caused by the cache busting file error caused a significant reduction in page views that day compared to the previous 2 Mondays.

Now i have deleted both caching plugins and don’t use any caching anymore as it actually slowed down my site speed reducing my page views.

Conclusion

Caching plugins can speed up your site if configured properly when they don’t conflict with another file and bust but it depends on your individual WordPress installation.

You can test your site speed using a range of different tools like:

• Pingdom
• Google Page Speed Online
• Yahoo! YSlow
• WordPress Optimization Guide
• Test Your Website Speed Globally
• Google Analytics Site Speed
• Free WPEngine Site Speed Report

These tools can help you find problems which are causing your pages to load slowly so you can fix the problems and make your site load faster.

Have you tested your sites page loading times and compared them to your page views? What where the results?