It is absolutely paramount for your website to be visually attractive and user-friendly. If your website is complicated or difficult to use, it won’t get used. If you are concerned by your rankings, your traffic quality, your conversion rates and anything else that determines the quality of your online presence, then you should be concerned by your website availability—that is, site speed and loading time.
Fast loading pages are an essential part of a user’s experience of your site and brand, the same way that customers who have to wait in line in a physical shop or institution will be discouraged to return. It’s a valuable investment because a fast site will mean happy users, and happy users almost always make us more money. Here are a couple of advantages of a fast site.
- Users use the site more
- They view more pages
- Conversions increase
- Less downtime
- Lower abandonment rates
These factors are simply the results of the usability of the website. Here are some pretty persuasive statistics.
- 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load.
- 51% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that crashed, froze, or received an error.
- 38% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that wasn’t available.
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
- If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.
Crucially, Google knows how long your site is taking to load. Loading time is taken into account by search engines because it is taken into account by web users. Site speed has been a ranking signal since 2010. That means that ‘page speed’ is used in the ranking algorithm, and if it’s a ranking signal then you need to be able to optimize it, even though it’s a difficult thing to do. You can now track your loading time in Google analytics. Google’s priority is a seamless, user-friendly experience in delivering quality results. If you don’t fit in with what Google wants to deliver to search engine users, they won’t deliver you. All your work on your website is aimed at getting traffic there, and then at converting traffic once it’s arrived. The loading speed of your site does both of these things, which is why it’s a beautifully simple and effective thing to aim for. There are basic tips to follow to increase page load speed and drastically reduce bounce rate.
For more information on increasing your site load speed visit www.optimising.com.au.