One of the most important components of a good dealer website is speed. Your website needs to load within two or three seconds, or else you run the risk that potential customers will get frustrated and pursue their auto buying needs elsewhere.
If you haven’t run any speed tests lately, stop and do so now. See how long it takes for your website to load fully. Make sure you check on multiple browsers and device types, too.
Hopefully, you’ll find that your dealer website loads with blazing speed—but what if you don’t? No need to panic. There are some simple steps you can take to improve your page loading times, starting with the five steps we’ve listed here.
5 Tips for Improving Your Dealership Website Speed
1. Upgrade your hosting.
The loading time for your page is largely determined by the hosting service you choose—so if you’re not getting top speeds, it may be worth looking into some different hosting possibilities. Note that a lot of dealers simply choose the cheapest hosting service they can find; this is understandable, but you get what you pay for, and super-cheap hosting services usually won’t offer top-notch speeds
2. Check your images.
Having a lot of high-res images on your website can cause the loading times to become sluggish—so if you know your site to be image-heavy, there are a few ways you can move forward. One is to consider just getting rid of some of those images. If you feel like that would be compromising the aesthetic appeal of your site, look into some image optimization plugins, which can help those pics load more rapidly.
3. Use a cache plugin.
Speaking of plugins, here’s another good option. When someone visits your site for the first time, they essentially have to download the whole thing—but if you use a cache plugin, many of your website components will be stored on each visitor’s computer, meaning subsequent visits will feature faster load times.
4. Get rid of any plugins you’re not using.
While some website plugins can help enhance loading speeds, others may have the opposite effect. Go through the list of plugins on your website and look for any that are superfluous or not in use—then get rid of them, plain and simple.
5. Check out the GMA SaaS platform.
One more recommendation is to contact us to learn about our dealer software solutions—which include a great website platform that ensures lightning-quick loading times. You can always reach out to us directly to find out more about what our website solutions entail.
Get the Website Your Dealership Needs to Succeed
A good website is paramount for dealership success—and that certainly means having a website that loads quickly. To learn more about this or about any of our other dealer marketing and software solutions, we invite you to contact Get My Auto today. Ask us about our SaaS service offerings!