While most dealerships have a website, and some are mobile-enabled, many have not been optimized to provide the fastest delivery of content. Whether it's a slow loading picture or a bad piece of flash animation, site speed is still an issue for a lot of automotive dealer websites.
Even a small delay in site speed with regards to load times will dramatically decrease customer satisfaction, page views and conversions. Most people expect a site to load in just a couple of seconds, and many will abandon a site if it takes too long to load. Businesses like Amazon and Walmart have taken steps to remedy slow site speed and have noticed lifts in conversions.
Some quick ways to improve site speed include reducing the number of elements on a page, using CSS instead of images when possible, combining several stylesheets into a single file, and reducing the amount of scripts running. Similarly, cleaning up extra spaces, line breaks and indentation in the code can shave some load time. Optimizing images for different page widths can help make site speed better by loading a smaller image on smaller devices. Moving inline CSS to a stylesheet may also help improve site speed when practical. Finally, plugins and redirects can make a website slower, so minimizing their use can give it a bit of a boost.
These aren't the only methods that can improve a website's speed, however they are typically the easiest to implement. Are your sites as fast as they should be? What are some things you all are doing to improve site speed?
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