Have you ever visited a website trying to get to an important information, only to leave before you’ve even started because the page is loading so slowly? Other visitors are doing this too, and if your site loads too slowly you might miss out on a valuable lead or customer. We’ve written this post to discuss three reasons why your site speed matters, and why you should be paying attention to it.
What is site speed?
Site speed is how fast your website pages load when a user is visiting.
How fast your website loads can vary depending on a number of factors, such as the number of images on the website, the size of the pages on your website, or the number of special plugins or applications installed on your website.
In some instances where your website loads slowly, it’s a user issue such as connection troubles. There are ways of testing your website to measure its page speed, and also ways of speeding up your website to make it more user-friendly and accessible.
Why does site speed matter?
Page speed is an essential component in an efficient and highly-converting website. But why should you be putting effort into making sure your pages loads quickly?
Site speed is important for SEO.
Google prioritizes fast-loading sites that users will love to visit. In fact, page speed is so important to Google that they even created a free tool for the public to test the speed of their own websites.
If you’re taking steps you improve your SEO and rank #1 on Google, don’t underestimate the power of page speed.
The Google PageSpeed Insights tool also offers a detailed report on why your website might be slow, and it suggests improvements that you can make to speed up the loading time.
Fast websites = user-friendly websites.
If you’ve ever visited a website that takes what seems like forever to load, you’ve probably experienced some frustration.
Users exploring your site page-by-page don’t want to wait 20 seconds for each page to load. If your pages are loading slowly, users who are purposely trying to navigate or even make a purchase can be deterred easily by long waiting times and pages that time out.
You should be looking to optimise your loading times not only to improve your Google ranking but to encourage your users to look around and interact with your website.
Here are some steps you can take to speed up your website:
- Compressing and scaling your images
- Reducing the size of your pages
- Removing visual elements such as animations that might not be necessary to the content of the page
Make a good impression on first-time users.
You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘first impressions matter’ and that is no different in the online world. It’s claimed that your website has about 50 milliseconds to make an impression on your user on the first visit. That means that if your website is slow to load, your potential customer will quickly exit and find another website to fulfill their needs. This will increase your bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors that leave your website after viewing only one page. If your users are quickly leaving due to a slow website, your bounce rate will increase.
This means that a website that loads slowly could be costing you visits, interactions, and even purchases. Speeding up your website so that your users stay and explore is a great way to help them smoothly along the buyer’s journey, from becoming aware of your business to becoming a repeat customer.
Summary
Why does site speed matter?
- Site speed is important for SEO
- Fast websites = user-friendly websites
- Make a good impression on first-time users
Site speed is not only important for your users, but for how you show up on Google too. By improving how fast your website loads, you can not only attract more users but keep them on your site and convert them into customers.
