Vacation Rental Website Speed Optimization Tool | Test Your Site Free

Domination Is In The Details

Getting a vacation rental website to rank on Google successfully means you’ll have to pay attention to the details.

I just wrote about the importance of tracking your vacation rental website and making yourself accountable for your site’s traffic info.

That’s the first step to improving your SEO and generating direct bookings from your website.

Be Accountable!

My goal in writing that blog was to help you with understanding those important details. In that post, I shared a tool that makes it easier to reveal the problems and opportunities hidden within your site.

Now that you’re equipped with that information, what are some practical things you can do to improve your website’s exposure and SEO?

Ratcheting Your Way To Success

You beat your competitors in search results by doing everything you can to boost your visibility.

That means you’ve gotta work on the big and small things, tweaking them and ratcheting your way to higher Google rankings.

You may be familiar with the strategy of optimizing a vacation rental website using keywords, but what about speed optimization?

Did you know that Google uses your website load time as a deciding factor on how high your website will rank in their search results?

Yep… how fast your website loads affects your SEO.

Is your website optimized for speed?

No One Likes To Wait

You see, waiting for a website to load is like standing in line waiting to order a cheeseburger.

If it takes way too long for you to order your food, you’ll leave and go somewhere else to eat.

Slow Website Speeds Equal A Poor User Experience

Google doesn’t like a poor user experience. Google wants their users to be happy with what Google suggests to them.

That’s why load time and speed matter to Google.

7 Statistics – How Your Website Speed Affects Bookings

Here are a few statistics to help drive home how the speed of your vacation rental website could be affecting your SEO and bookings.

• A recent study by Radware revealed 51% of Internet shoppers in the United States said that if a website takes too long to load, they will not complete a purchase.

• In a similar study, Radware found that the demand for faster loading website speeds have increased over time.

• Here’s an example- In 2010, a webpage that took six seconds to load experienced a -40% conversion hit.

• Now how about 2014? That same loading time suffered -50% conversion hit…. ouch!

• Research has found that 47% of web users expect a website to load in under two seconds.

• During peak traffic times, 75% of consumers are willing to visit competitor sites instead of dealing with a slow loading page.

• Strange Loop has stated that just “a one-second delay can cost you 7 percent of sales.”

The “Bigger” The Website, The Bigger The Issues

Larger websites with multiple pages can be more difficult to speed up as I explain in the video.

However, most vacation rental websites can be optimized for speed without too much difficulty.

I’ve been working on developing a rather large and dynamic vacation rental listing site called BreakAwayVR.com.

During the development process, we ran into several issues that made the site slow and sluggish. It was mainly because of the content and shear size of the site.

The problem was pretty bad. We actually got an “F” grade on our website after our initial development phase… until we used a few optimization tools.

What’s Your Website Grade? Test Your Site In Seconds!

In the video above, I share a tool we used to identify our problems. I also show you how you can use it and how to read your website report so you can improve your property website speed and performance. 

Optimizing the speed of your site is something every website owner should do after they’ve developed their site.

Developing a vacation rental website and optimizing it are two different tasks, but they are related. I explain that more in the video.

In my next related post, I’ll be revealing to you what the 7 biggest and most common website speed issues are that you could run into, plus the tools I used to fix them.

Make sure you’ve joined our free vacation rental marketing newsletter to stay in the loop.

If you need some help, contact me. I’d be happy to answer your questions!

What did you think about the video? How did your website score?