Why is page speed so important for pest control websites?
We’ve already covered why conversion rates are so important. Let me give you a quick recap. If you have a lot of people visiting your pages on your website, landing pages and such, you can literally get two times as many leads just by doing a little bit of conversion rate optimization.
Let’s say you have 10,000 visitors to a page and 100 people are converting. If you just do some conversion rate optimization and end up getting 200 people instead, that is a 2x increase in leads. That’s mind blowing.
I run Pest Control SEO, a marketing agency for pest control companies. And I can tell you that page speed is some of the lowest hanging fruit you can tackle. One of the biggest factors of conversion rate optimization is page speed, especially regarding the website.
Here’s the thing. People can get to your website from any kind of platform. Facebook ads, Google Ads, SEO, however they’re finding you. But this is really the first thing. They click on your site. Now they are primed to buy. They are interested. They are clearly ready.
This would be the worst kind of lead to lose.
And yet, one of the first components, there are many different components of the actual page, but imagine if you do everything right before that. You finally funnel them to the page, and the page doesn’t even load. The page takes 10, 20 seconds to load.
It literally does happen. And I mentioned before, people have the attention span of a goldfish, actually worse. Goldfish have an attention span of eight seconds. People have an attention span of seven seconds. It might be 7.2 or something. It’s just going down.
We really can’t expect people to wait that long, especially now because the internet has evolved. The web has evolved.
Speed Is Expected Now
Maybe back in the day, when websites were just coming out and people were just starting to look for services and just starting to use Google, maybe you would have waited a minute for a page to load and that was just kind of expected.
But now speed is so important and people are used to speed. Most of the websites you search up and click on, if you ever search up Instagram or Twitter, it’s lightning fast. It loads right away.
So anything that is different from that, three seconds, five seconds, that’s like a lifetime now. Because people are in this short form loop now.
We really need to make sure that we are optimizing for page speed first.
Your Funnel Is Closed If Page Speed Sucks
Another way to think of this is we have a funnel of how we’re getting customers. There’s the very top of funnel and we might be running Facebook ads. You could argue there are different funnels here, but you could argue this is almost like middle funnel.
Really what we need to be doing is optimizing for each part of the top of funnel because that will open up the bottom of funnel.
If the page speed is horrible, then nothing else matters because they can’t even get to the bottom of funnel. Your funnel is closed. The funnel comes down here and your funnel just completely stops. It can’t let any water come through, however you want to think of it.
Your funnel is closed off because of your page speed or because of something else. You need to make sure that your funnel is open all the way through. That’s why page speed is so important.
Use WP Engine, WordPress, and Cloudflare
Which website hosting options offer the fastest speeds for pest control sites?
We talked about this before as well. I recommend building using WP Engine, WordPress, and Cloudflare. Those three are really solid.
That is basically industry standard, not even pest control, but really just across websites. That’s what every major website uses.
To go a little bit deeper on that, we don’t need a crazy WP Engine plan. I think we can just get the standard one, which is $25 a month.
Cloudflare, there is a free plan, which is still great. And if you’re really on a budget, you should do that. But most websites, you should probably be doing the $20 a month plan. It provides you a little bit more security, a little bit more stability.
And WordPress, that actually doesn’t cost any money to build because you’re already paying for the backend. But then there might be plugins and such that you’re going to need.
Those core components, WP Engine, WordPress, and Cloudflare will be really great.
Some people might build on other platforms and even argue that the conversion rates will be better. People might build on Go High Level or on Framer or these different platforms and that’s fine.
But part of something else to consider here is SEO. These platforms, part of the reason I mentioned them, is because they’re also the best for SEO. They’re the most secure. Half the internet is built on WordPress. There is more schema and more information shared.
So usually I recommend using those three platforms.
Big Photos Are Killing Your Page Speed
What are the common mistakes that slow down pest control websites?
One main one, and we mentioned this before, is big photos. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s filling up the entire page of my homepage. It’s actually just about how the image is submitted to the site.
You might unknowingly do this. This usually happens when you take photos, especially on a professional camera. Because they’re so high quality, they will show up huge. As in the dimensions of the photo might be 5,000 by 3,000, which is huge.
The image really, I’m not going to go into the exact dimensions because image optimizers will do this, but let’s say you have 5,000 by 3,000. Really that should be like a 50 by 30 photo.
So your photo is actually massive in Google’s eyes, even though it looks the same to you. You might lose a tiny bit of quality compressing it, which is what you should be doing, but you will get back a lot of page speed.
That is one of really the easiest things we can do there. And most people just don’t know that or they don’t know how to fix it.
There are plenty of different plugins you can use. There is Image Optimizer Pro, whichever one. Just look up Image Optimizer in WordPress and use some kind of plugin for that and that will really help.
Use PageSpeed Insights to Find JavaScript Problems
Something else that affects page speed is you might use a tool like PageSpeed Insights. You can do a search for PageSpeed Insights. That is a free Google tool that tells you how fast any given page on your website is.
A lot of times you’ll see that it will say that there is too much JavaScript on the site. And usually what that means is you have too many plugins on the site.
WordPress is a great website builder and really we should be using it. That’s kind of the standard. But a problem some people make is that they have way too many plugins on their site.
Really we want to make sure that we’re being careful with how many plugins we have. You don’t want to have like 50 plugins.
Let’s say you hire five different agencies and one uses this set of plugins, then the other one uses another five. Now the other one uses another five and the other one uses another five. By the time we have that, the site’s moving really slow now.
So we have to be careful about that as well. Don’t have any plugins that we don’t need. And obviously be careful with that too, because removing some plugins could actually be really detrimental.
Make sure you’re actually a pro or consulting with a pro regarding this issue. But plugins can be really costly in terms of page speed.
Big Sites Are Naturally Slower
Then something overall is just really the size of the site. If you have a lot of different pages, if you have a lot of content, you can expect the site to be a little bit slower versus a site that is really lean, has five pages, barely any content.
It’s just naturally going to be slower because Google is not loading the whole site, but at least preparing to load the whole site. So that will slow down the site a little bit.
Even that’s not like, you don’t have to worry about that too much, because there are huge sites that still perform really fast and they have to do extra optimization for that. But that’s another thing to take into consideration.
If you have a lot of plugins, if you have a lot of content, that’s probably going to slow down your site.
Use Rank Math for SEO
Are there any plugins or tools that can help improve page speed?
Overall, we want to make sure that we have some kind of core SEO tool or SEO plugin for our website. The standard one most people use is Yoast SEO and they have a pretty good free plan.
What we use is Rank Math. It’s a little bit more expensive, but it’s definitely better. That is a plugin on WordPress and that is regarding everything SEO and that is partially page speed.
But still, you’re going to want to download a completely separate plugin just for image compression and optimization, because that’s such a big factor.
Audit Your Top Pages Monthly
How often should you audit or optimize your website’s page speed?
Obviously you want to optimize it to start. You realize it’s a problem. Maybe you take on an agency like mine or you’re talking to a consultant and you realize, dang, the page speed is horrible. Then we want to fix that immediately. That’s an immediate problem, we need to fix that right away.
Moving on from that, I’d say at the very least once a month. But probably more importantly, check when you’re making big changes to your top pages.
Let’s say one of your top pages is a Pest Control Chicago page. You’re generating a good amount of SEO leads from it and maybe even some other kinds of leads. We should be checking that more often.
That’s kind of like the 80-20. If you have 20% of your pages generate you 80% of your results, we should mainly be checking those pages because we can kind of assume that if most pages are similar, like we have the same layout for all of our different location pages, it’ll just be different copy and different images and content within the pages.
So as long as we optimize the top ones that are all about the same, then we can assume all the other ones are good as well. Because if you run a different page speed report across the whole website, it’s going to take a while. You don’t really need to do that.
But definitely your homepage pretty often. That might be every week or so. And again, it’s more so when you’re making big changes. When you are adding or removing plugins. When you’re adding or removing videos. When you’re adding or removing several images.
Those kinds of things, you want to do a page speed report and make sure it’s still good.
Don't Use Animations on Your Pages
What are some other mistakes that we may have missed?
I’ve got an easy one. We really, in my opinion, we shouldn’t have any animations on our pages.
Animations, especially at the top of the page, usually slow it down a good amount. It’s nothing crazy, and I already mentioned kind of the bigger ones, but this is an easy fix that might reduce the page speed by like half a second, maybe even a second.
Especially some sites I see go all out and they try to, there’s an animation for the heading. And really it’s also when they’re combined. There’s an animation for the heading. There’s an animation for the header. There’s an animation for the first photo, the text.
Some people do an animation on every single thing, which some platforms allow you to do. I’ve done that on Framer. But it looks cool, I guess, on a landing page. But we want to make sure that that’s not affecting our page speed.
That’s a really big one that I think some people miss.
Fix Your Page Speed Today
The bottom line is this: page speed is low hanging fruit. It’s one of the easiest ways to double your conversion rate without spending a dime on more traffic.
Use WP Engine, WordPress, and Cloudflare. Compress your images with an optimizer plugin. Limit your plugins to only what you actually need. Use PageSpeed Insights to identify JavaScript issues. Audit your top pages monthly and whenever you make big changes. And skip the animations.
People have a seven second attention span. If your page takes 10 seconds to load, you’ve already lost them.
Your funnel is closed. Open it up by fixing your page speed.
Keep Learning and Growing
Want to connect with over 2,000 pest control business owners who are optimizing their websites for maximum performance? Join our free Facebook group, Pest Control Millionaires. We share page speed strategies, optimization tips, and technical solutions every day.
And if you want the complete guide to building fast, high-converting pest control websites, check out Zip Code Kings. We break down the exact hosting setup, plugins, and optimization strategies that keep sites loading in under two seconds.
Now go fix that page speed.
