Internet connections are getting faster but does your website’s speed need to improve?

After all, we’re not on dialup modems any more.

But the answer to the question of whether or not website speed still matters is a resounding “yes”.

Although the days of dial up modems are near enough over – to the extend that there’s a project at the moment by a Swedish museum curator called Torsten Nilsson who’s collecting distinctive sounds before they disappear forever – that doesn’t mean that visitors tolerate slow websites.

If anything, tolerance levels have gone down as internet speeds have increased.

Even though all the files are bigger, we expect them to be delivered faster. After all, we’ve paid for a fast broadband at home and on our phones!

There are several things that can affect your website’s speed.

You can get a quick idea at sites like Pingdom which will give your site an overall ranking. But you have to remember that it’s just a snapshot – I ran two tests on my own site and the first one put me as being faster than 56% of websites they’d tested, the next one (a few minutes later) showed the site as being faster than 86% of websites.

But it does offer some clues about where your site is experiencing a bottleneck.

The quickest fix if you’re using WordPress is to install a plugin such as WP Super Cache.

This is free – you can just search for it in WordPress plugins and install it from there – and does quite a few things behind the scenes that allow your website host to deliver your site faster.

It won’t make any difference the first time a page is accessed (and pages expire from the cache after a while) but it will certainly help for subsequent visits to that page.

It also makes checking pages you’ve revised several times a bit awkward.

If you’ve ever made a number of small changes to a page, pressed the publish button but not seen any effect on the page itself, that’s probably the cache doing its job and you need to go into settings and delete the cache to be able to see your recent changes.

That’s not something you’re likely to encounter too often – I hit it occasionally when I’m doing lots of changes to a sales letter.

The next thing to check is image sizes.

Cameras and phones have more and more mega pixels with every generation.

That means that they hold more data about the image and file sizes get bigger.

If you use the built-in WordPress “add media” button, most of the technical details are taken care of and if necessary a smaller image will be shown on the page.

But if you upload images yourself – using your control panel or some FTP software – then you need to just double check that they’re not a gigantic size when you reference them in your posts.

Another thing that can slow your website is using too many WordPress plugins.

Depending on how well they’re coded and whether they’re called on every page on your site or just on the page they’re needed on (such as a video plugin), that can affect how fast or slow your site loads up.

There are some checker tools out there if you suspect that is a problem or you can pay someone on Fiverr to offer suggestions if you prefer.

Following these simple steps should help make your website speed better and keep your site visitors happier.